Location, Location, Location

It may be a real estate slogan but it's as applicable to photography as it is to anything related to buying  property.

This photograph wasn't made on the plains of Africa or even at the zoo. There's a small lake 5 minutes walk from the office of one of our clients in an industrial area here in Perth where the local wildlife congregates and this photograph was made there. The only trick in making it was to find an angle to shoot the birds at that didn't include either factories in the background or the rubbish that has been washed into the lake.

The point of this post is, keep your eyes open when you're walking around, you might be surprised at what you can find.

There could be a byline to the post relating to the use of light since the photograph was made at midday in the ful summer sun. Who says you can't shoot in harsh light!

Less is sometimes More

This might not be a Scott Bourne photograph, but it is an example of a couple of principles that are worth considering when you are editing the photographs you make. The original photograph I made was done from the end of my driveway at home. Here it is:

 The edited version reminds me that:

1. Less is More. There is value in cropping your images. If the edited version doesn't belong in the Bourne collection, then the original probably belongs in the bin. And that brings me to the second reminder but I'll come to that. The edited version is a better photograph because it has lost all of the distractions and their absence makes the simplicity of what remains work (I think anyway). The other thing I was able to get from the cropped image was a photograph that is straight! You can see from the original that I wasn't holding the camera straight when I pushed the shutter - I problem I commonly suffer from.
2. Review your Old Stuff. I wouldn't have found the edited version had I not been spending a little time reviewing material I had shot a while ago. It's worth doing this for a couple of reasons. The first is that you tend to review photographs from a shoot at the time you take them from the camera and pick the ones that are obviously the best of that particular shoot. This one wasn't in that list so it got overlooked. It wasn't until I was reviewing old stuff (particularly old stuff that I hadn't picked when I first took it) that I saw the potential in this one. The second reason for reviewing your work is that your tastes (and abilities with tools like Lightroom and Photoshop) change over time. Sometimes I look at the old stuff I processed at the time I took it and re-process it from scratch. It might just be me, but I find the processing I did of my older work tends to be a bit "over the top" so re-processing in a more subtle manner often times does wonders for a photograph.
3. Pay Attention to the Detail. One of the things that makes this photograph work in my opinion is the shape of the silhouette of the bird on the right. I didn't really spot this until I reviewed this photograph at full screen size (or thereabouts). If I had looked at the photographs from the shoot that this one was in at a reasonable size rather than picking the keepers by looking at thumbnails in Lightroom, I might have potted the potential in this one at the time I took it. When you are looking at your work, it is worth spending just a little bit of time looking at it big!
4. You don't have to go far. Finally, as I said at the beginning of the post, the original as shot at the end of my driveway. I guess that, in the two and a bit years I've owned a camera, I have made about 25,000 photographs. I can't tell you how many of them I have taken within 50 paces of where I sit writing this post. While planning and travel certainly make the process of making photographs more fun and more appealing (maybe), neither of them is a requirement for a good image.

There will be plenty more to be leaned by me from this photograph but that will do for now.