As I See It - Photography Pages

Creative Challenge

In August 2005 a dramatic change in personal circumstances meant that, for the first time in my working life, I was able to enjoy some free time in the evenings. In order to make the most of this opportunity I joined my local camera club.

Besides the normal club competitions with 'open' subject, Owen Brennan delivered a challenge to encourage members to be creative. Each person who took up the challenge provided a subject. Each entrant had to judge the entries for their subject and provide one photograph for each of the others.

Now I am not particularly creative, but I was challenged. I managed to portray some of the subjects with a simple photograph, but for others I was compelled to explore the possibilities for manipulation provided in Photo Manipulation Software.

Kite Aerial Photography - KAP

Digital Camera Magazine (UK) ran a feature on KAP in their March 2004 edition. The article was illustrated with beautiful images and provided, a website address (Sadly no longer available). Upon following up this lead I quickly discovered that I had nearly everything I needed, camera, radio control gear, and the skill and materials to build a rig. The only thing missing was a suitable kite. I soon put this right, and entered the world of Kite Ariel Photography.

No doubt much Ariel Photography is now being done with modern drones. A really good one of these will make your wallet substantially thinner. You may want to stick to old school for economy or perhaps you just like flying kites and can kill two birds with one stone.

Panorama

PANORAMA: A picture or series of pictures representing a continuous scene. (Some people would qualify this by requiring a picture to be at least twice as wide as it is high).

The simplest way of producing a panorama is to take a photograph at a distance and/or with a wide angle lens, then crop it down to a letterbox shape. My panoramas are created by stitching together several frames from an Olympus C5000Z digital camera.