Saturday 9 October 2010

Andrew Sanderson - Home Photography: Inspiration on you Doorstep




This book was recommended to me by my tutor after assignment 3 "My Neighbourhood". I managed to grab a second hand copy from Amazon (which came all the way from India??!) and have thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It's a very easy book to read (unlike a lot of photography books that can be very verbose and abstract in language) and is well illustrated with lots of inspirational ideas. What was particularly interesting is that although the book was written in a time of colour photography, most of the images are not in colour. It was also written before the explosion of digital photography but makes use of a number of post processing techniques to add creativity to the images. Heavy use of photoshop is often criticised in photography circles, and yet creative image processing was used long before it's invention. It simply moves the processing from a dark smelly room onto a pc. I know which one I prefer! I tend not to use many of the creative features of photoshop because I think of it as graphic art rather than photography. In particular, I have not used it much in this course. However I have taken the liberty to try some digital processing techniques in this post.

The book was written after the author became a new father. Like myself, he often found himself staring out at the beautiful skies but unable to head out to make the most of it in stunning landscapes because he was looking after the children. If I had a pound for every time I experienced that frustration, it could pay for my entire photography habit.

I set myself the objective of trying to open my eyes and find inspiration around the home. This included making use of interesting light, creative depth of field or post processing. I also included taking the dog for a local walk in my definition of "home" and a wander around the garden to see what I could find. I also used a free download from Poladroid to create "poloroid" look photos. Finally I included a post processing experiment on a popular view from my local city of Newcastle. Ironically, once I had set myself this objective we had the most beautiful sunsets which I had to capture from inside the house.

So here's the fruits of my labours - inspiration on my doorstep.






























2 comments:

  1. What an interesting post. I love your photographs (particularly the jam jar with the spoon). It goes to show what is available close at hand but a large measure of inspiration is needed - and you seem to have plenty of that!

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