Back in September 2018 my photography group spent a day in Birmingham. I took a lot of photographs of reflections of buildings in the canals, and in the vast glass facades of other buildings; also many images of the buildings, or the stone and brick, themselves. Following an email conversation with a photographer friend, about some work of hers, it occurred to me to recrop some of the Birmingham photographs, to create a more abstract outcome.
For an explanation of why this was 'challenging', please see the earlier post.
Badges
The Museum is closely associated with the Jaguar car company, which is on the adjacent site.
For our November meeting, my photography group had decided on an indoor venue, in case of bad weather. We went to the National Motor Museum at Gaydon, in Warwickshire. I have zero interest in cars, but I wanted to join the outing, as I'd had to miss the October meeting, and it matters to keep the group together as a group. So my first challenge was to imagine how it might be feasible to make interesting images among a hangar full of cars . . .
The second challenge is that the camera I would have preferred to take is away being repaired, and I didn't want to lug around a heavy bag with all my lenses - I had no idea what I was going to be faced with, so I would have had to take everything. So I ended up taking my little 'travel zoom' camera which has a very small sensor . . . and the third challenge was the light levels. The spaces seemed well-lit to the human eye, but the camera thought otherwise. Ideally, what was required was a tripod and long exposures, but you can't do that in a crowded museum. So all the photographs were taken with very high ISO, which has produced extremely grainy images.
The third and fourth challenges were, (a) that the museum is very crammed with cars and every photograph had unwanted other items crowding into the background, and (b) that cars on display are polished and shiny . . . creating highlighted reflections everywhere!
I took a lot of photos and discarded many of them, for any or all of the reasons above! From those I kept I've assembled three categories; two are 'wheels' and 'badges' - fairly obviously associated with cars. The third group . . . I was struck, especially with the older cars, how much the front views resembled schematic faces; so my third category is 'faces'.
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Wheels
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| buzzard circles on a thermal |
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| twisty tree - perch for a jackdaw |
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| along the hedgerow |
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| bulrushes in the lake, squirrel in the churchyard |
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| through the churchyard |
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| bridge near the lake |
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| and the stonework in monochrome . . . because I always prefer it! |
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| sunset over the allotments* |
