Entry 2 of a ’52 weeks’ project I’m having a crack at wherein every image of the project will be taken at f22 and will therefore be unforgivingly sharp throughout the focal range.
I love these structures and think I will probably take quite a lot of photographs of them for this project, but it’s a bit of a miserable one this … it was grey, dull and rainy, and there’s so much clutter. I’m not sure I like it a great deal but I suppose it’s not feasible to expect that I’ll be happy with every image I take for this project. I guess it’s half the point that you don’t, and therefore learn something.
Here’s an image I took of some gas towers in Hackney when I lived there a few years back …
In a rush of New Year’s motivation I decided to give a ’52 weeks’ project a go this year. What this means is that you pick a certain theme and then use it to make an image every week. They’re very popular among budding photographers and the benefits they give to developing a certain skill or sensibility are obvious.
Last year I bought a wonderful lens – a Sigma f1.4 50mm. It can take pictures with extreme ‘bokeh’ – a very shallow depth of field – where only a very small part of the image is in focus, and the rest is blurred. Here’s a couple of examples:
The effect is very pretty, very impactful. It helps focus the attention of the eye, and removes distracting background clutter by blurring it out.
The problem is that it’s too easy! It’s almost like cheating; like adding free pathos to every image you take.
So, in order to try and avoid getting stuck in a rut, and to help keep my brain working, I thought I would make f22 the theme of my 52 weeks project. For the uninitiated, this means that the whole image will be in crisp focus, no shallow depth of field helping to make my pictures look better than they really are.
Above is my first effort, somewhat lazily taken out of the roof window of my study, overlooking the houses of Forest Hill.
A picture of some climbers getting ready to ascend Buachaille Etive Mor, one of the prettiest peaks in the Scottish Highlands
