DAY FIFTEEN

Serendipitous day yesterday. 
 
Perhaps inspired by yesterday's mea culpa about not creating something everyday but more likely a  show-stopping display of yellow leaves through the gloom of the afternoon mist, I found myself taking photos on my phone for about an hour yesterday. The idea was just to take a quick snap to remind me of the scene, but I ended up taking more than fifty pictures despite the dreek conditions.

Just about everything was against the taking of decent photos - mist, resulting in a low, flat light; a fairly monotonous subject matter (shaded woodland) with little contrast; a phone camera, which takes a lot of work to obtain decent results; and I was in a hurry to get home. All that said the spirit of Fox Talbot was apparently with me. Some of the results were really quite pleasing, startlingly so in one or two cases. I have no idea how that came about*.
 
Here is one of the results, though by no means the most interesting. I've put it here to illustrate a point about serendipity and luck in a creative process.
 
These oak leaves were in a particularly gloomy spot and so, with no expectation of a result (as there is no real control of the phone camera's flash), I decided to attempt some fill-in flash, just to see if I could get a bit of 'pop' in the photo. And I got more than I supposed. 
 
What seems to have happened is that the camera exposed for the pre-flash of the actual flash bouncing back off the wet leaves, in the process throwing the background into almost complete darkness. The effect is not perfect, but it's certainly interesting, to me at least. Even more interesting is that the two shots either side of this one, same subject, same technique, are really rather ordinary, no 'pop' to speak of, and typical of what I usually get from a phone camera. The difference was probably fractions of a degree of angle, or maybe movement of an inch or two closer or further away, none of which I could have controlled for.

A win is a win as they say, and I'll certainly take yesterday's results, regardless of my actual input.
 
Onwards...

 
 
* I'm reminded of Laurence Olivier's mystified response to being congratulated on another magnificent theatre performance: "Yes, I know, but how did I do it?". 
 
 
 


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