Bored

Another lovely evening saw me walking round the lake again. This time with some firm ideas. Ideas which were thwarted by a) forgetting my polarising filter and b) the wind ruffling the surface of the  water. My best laid plans to photography more water lilies had gang agley. So I pottered about making lousy pictures. The best of a bad lot being the one below. Another one that ticks a load of compositional boxes but still fails to quite make it.

Slightly more successful were some pictures I took when I stumbled upon four rusting VW Beetles in the car park at another lake when I had gone to fish there. Prior to getting the fishing tackle out I spent a while snapping away with my little fishing camera. This was both a good and a bad thing. Good in so much as I got some reasonable pictures, bad as it drained the camera's battery, meaning it died on me at sunset.

Fired up by the experience I returned the following day to make some more pictures with the 'proper' camera. I thought I'd be a smart-arse and use two single focal length lenses for this. Almost immediately I started I regretted the decision. Or rather my knees did. It's easy to take low angle shots using a flippy screen to frame them. Less so when you have to move yourself to alter framing when knelt down without the ability to zoom the lens. To my surprise I didn't repeat myself too much on the second visit. Maybe using a different approach made me look at things differently and as a result see different pictures. First attempt, second go.

The strongest pictures from both visits were the ones which eliminated the background and made graphic compositions. This is often the way when photographing man made objects with their straight lines and radiused curves.

It's tempting to make a third visit to get in closer still and make abstract shots from the rust and so forth. But it could also turn out to be a bit too camera-club-clichéville. It's bad enough photographing rusting cars in the first place...

Which is why I'm bored. I feel like I keep photographing the same old stuff in the same old way. At the minute that same old way seems to be a front on, slap bang in the middle of the frame composition. Especially when walking round town like I did today.

Partly it's in an effort to avoid even more tediously plonking something on a 'third'. Mostly it's because I like making pictures which could have been made using a grid for guidance.

Tedious, isn't it? I need to stop messing about and get serious about something. It could be worse, though. I could be photographing sunsets...

---