A-Z
// June 12th, 2011 // Misc
What is going on here?
An explanation might be…
A few years ago my friend and fellow photographer Matthew Nassau had a regular weekly ‘photo challenge’ where we’d shoot to some sort of a subject for a week and at the end exchange and critique photos. It was a great way to motivate ourselves to shoot new stuff, experiment and do things we wouldn’t otherwise get around to trying.
As we both got busier – me with my business and Matt with a his young family – we wound down the challenges, the last uncompleted one being to make a series of photos that looked like the letters of the alphabet… uncompleted until now that is! We’ve started the challenges again.
Despite photography being a full time occupation for me nowadays I still love it, more than ever in fact. When I take pictures for fun I want to get out of the work mindset, to clearly fence off this play time as something different, that I don’t have to take too seriously or stress about getting perfect. Part of this for me is equipment. I have a small kit I use when I’m shooting purely for fun, consisting of a single 5Dmk2 body, Canon 50mm f1.4 and Canon 28mm f1.8 prime lenses, 580Ex flash and off-camera flash cable and a flash bracket. That plus spare batteries, memory cards and lens cloth goes into a netbook sized shoulder bag.
For this particular challenge I further limited myself to the 28mm lens, no flash, all photos to be shot in portrait orientation and a couple of hours I had to spare in St Werburghs in Bristol one sunny afternoon. But more important than that for me was trying to deliberately make the letters very un-obvious. The photos I shoot for work usually have to communicate a very clear message as quickly and unambiguously as possible. The photos I admire most by other people are often the complete opposite, not having an obvious subject or explanation for what’s going on. When I got to looking through my A-Z I was pleased to discover I couldn’t at first work out what letters some of them were supposed to be!
no images were found