Close to f/2.8

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Originally uploaded by DFW-Photo

The closest my standard lens comes to selective sharpness is f/4.5, so that's what I used here.

The "composition" of the still life is just as they happened to be lying on the table. It is almost a matter of principle to me that I take reality as given and do not interfere to make compositions "better" than what fate gives me. Exception: blades of grass or dead leaves and similar small things that I can easily take away.

Looking at the photo, I don't like the horizontals of the courgettes in the middle: they break the dominant verticals in the composition, and therefore take attention away from the area of sharpness, more in the foreground. Though that is a little better in the original large-size photo: there you see that the courgettes are really out of focus and the sunflowers stand out very clearly (or rather: sharply) from the dark-green background. (That effect is one of the reasons why you should never judge photos in the small screen on the back of your camera: sharpness and bokeh are very different in the original size.)

Just pulling some strings: what cropping can do

I was just toying around with a photo from last weekend's basket makers. One had some handmade rope lying on the table, and I found the forms of it irresistible: the mix of order (nicely wound up, tied together, and the rope itself, made of twisted fibres) and irregularity (visibly hand-made) did it, I guess. And then the question is: what is a good format for showing that? The square one, with two bundles that seem to go away from one another as your eye moves from left to right (as Europeans tend to do), or more simply, focusing even more by 'pulling the strings' of the cropping tool so that you see only one bundel of it. Should I have cropped even more and take away all of the burgundy background? Naaah, I feel like having a glass of red wine anyway ;-)

Close-Up and (Im-)Personal

Getting close to my idea of what makes a picture worth showing, is picturing a (little) bit of reality, something you and I and everyone may walk past daily, but that you never looked at in this way. Close-up and macro photography of inanimate, impersonal objects holds this type of charm for me. 'This way' and 'charm' are meant to avoid the word 'beauty'. Of course, an object may be beautiful in obvious ways, but I think I often prefer the hidden beauty of decay, of past glory.



Take this close-up of some kind of agricultural machine, shot in the neighbourhood of an old shed in a rural part of Holland. You maybe never saw how it had 'lived' and worked, grown old, used, worn-down, and rusted. It may be paradoxical that this has to do with the passage of time: how can you show time in a still picture? The stillness and restfulness of this machine part is emphasised in the simple and quiet compostion: in a single plane, parallel to the plane of the picture and with diffuse natural light. Two bolt-like things form an imaginary, visual, practically horizontal line. To the right there then is a vertical line to break--and in that way at the same time stress--the horizontal main line in the composition. A little bit of Mondriaan in a real-world object.

Yet the rust and wear show clearly that this thing has been out and about for a long time. The bolts or axes or whatever they are, are completely rusted and can never be undone anymore. Moreover, in the composition, the imagined horizontal line between the bolts is not quite horizontal and that gives some movement to the picture; movement is time. So both object and composition tell about time, its passage, and what this has done to the object.

That, in turn, makes the inanimate object something personal to me, worth looking at, worth showing to you.