CAPTURE DETAILS
Put together a striking collection of images based on a simple theme of your choice
Although some photographers work on personal projects for months or even years on end, don’t feel that you have to. The whole point of projects is to give your photography a purpose, and sometimes that purpose may be to fill just a single day, or an hour or two.
For example, let’s assume you’ve planned a day out with your camera at a great location and on the day, the weather decides to be cloudy and dull. Your dreams of shooting some fantastic scenic images fade before you even get started. So what to do? Pack up and head home, or try something different? That’s exactly how this project came about. Marooned on Lindisfarne, Northumberland’s Holy Island, at high tide on a damp day, it was a case of sitting around until the causeway back to the mainland was open again (around two hours after high tide, just in case you’re ever there), or make the best of a bad deal and take some photographs.
As it happens, Lindisfarne is a great place for detail shots. There’s a working harbour on the island and all the paraphernalia that comes with it – fish crates, lobster pots, piles of ropes, chains, old boats in various states of disrepair scattered in the long grass – and unique fishermen’s huts created from old herring boats, some more than a century old.
Blue is also a common colour on the island for no apparent reason, so after a few minutes of head scratching, it was decided that a project based on blue would be a good idea. All the shots were taken handheld with a 2470mm zoom lens, over a period of around two hours and in a relatively small area around the harbour – basically just wandering around and photographing anything that fitted the brief and looked interesting.
Of course, it’s all well and good shooting dozens of images linked by a theme, but what do you do with them all? Well, one option is to create a photo montage. Individual detail images are rarely much to shout about, but put a bunch of them together and it’s a different story. You often see them for sale as posters in touristy places – Doors of Dublin, Windows of Bath etc. Creating your own is really easy, and when you’re done, you can make a nice big print and hang it on the wall.
“One option is to create a photo
montage”