Month: April 2024

Want to add impact to your monochrome images? Try pointing your camera at the sun instead of away from it. Lee Frost offers his top tips for creating great shots by shooting contre-jour.

All images © Lee Frost

1. On a high

The first thing you need to remember when shooting into the sun is that contrast – the difference in brightness between the highlights and shadows – is going to be much higher than normal because you’ll have intense brightness in the background and potentially extreme darkness in the foreground. This does vary enormously. For example, on a misty morning, contrast is much lower than on a sunny day. However, in all situations the sun and sky are always going to be much brighter than the rest of the scene, so you need to take care when determining the exposure and adjust it according to the type of result you want.

2. In silhouette

If you just set your camera to aperture-priority (or any automatic exposure mode) and fire away, more often than not you’ll get an exposure that’s correct for the bright background, while the much darker foreground records as a silhouette because your camera’s metering system is overly influenced by the bright tones in the scene. Far from being a mistake, this effect can produce stunning results.

3. The low down

Around sunrise and sunset is a great time to shoot silhouettes, as the sun is low in the sky, and you can juxtapose subjects against it.

I love shooting in city streets at dawn once the sun comes up. Harsh light glances off tyre-worn asphalt and overhead power lines, while cars are reduced to silhouettes and exhaust fumes are backlit to add atmosphere. Shadows also rush towards the camera, adding depth and dynamism.

 

Read more in issue 287.

With its snow-covered landscapes, isolated details and stark contrasts, winter is the perfect season to shoot minimalist images. Lee Frost offers his top tips for making much less go a lot further.

All images © Lee Frost

1. Where and when to shoot

Ideally, you need fresh snow blanketing the landscape. I shoot most of my minimalist winter landscapes in Iceland and Norway, where heavy snowfall is pretty much guaranteed, so if you’re thinking about a trip to Iceland, I’d definitely recommend going between January and March. In the UK, it’s anyone’s guess from one year to the next if we’ll get snow, although the further north and the higher you go, the greater the probability that you will. Upland regions of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Cumbria and Northumberland are good bets. Snow in the Scottish Highlands is pretty much a given. I also favour overcast days, so the sky is plain and simple – flat grey sky and crisp white snow creates a perfect backdrop. Cloudless blue sky can work well too, but the light is much harsher, whereas on overcast days the light is very soft. You don’t really want strong shadows, as they make the compositions more complicated.

2. All square

This is purely down to personal choice, but I almost always crop my minimalist landscapes to a square format. It enhances the sense of balance and simplicity and makes the images easier on the eye. The rectangular format is dynamic whereas the square format is symmetrical and sedate. I also tend to position the key element or elements centrally in the composition so the square format frames them and leads the eye directly to them. You can set your camera’s aspect ratio to 1:1 if you like, so you get crop marks in the viewfinder and on the preview image to aid composition. However, with some cameras the images are cropped to a square automatically when you open the Raw file, so remember to set the aspect ratio back to full when you don’t want or need the square crop.

3. Subject matters

There are no hard and fast rules here – it’s really whatever catches your eye. After snowfall, I’d recommend just heading out to see what you can find. Parks and large public gardens can be good hunting grounds, as they’re laid out in a regimented fashion, so you’ll often find avenues of trees, neatly clipped hedges or topiary, walls and fences all standing out starkly against the freshly fallen snow. Stately homes and National Trust gardens are a good bet. Out in the countryside, look for fence lines arching over hills or stretching into the distance, single trees against a snowy backdrop and lines of telegraph posts stretching into the distance. Churches with tall steeples, monuments and even garden ornaments can work well too.

 

For more tips, check out issue 286.

Tim Daly explores the streets of Herman Melville’s Liverpool in search of any remaining traces of the 19th-century docks and surrounding warehouses. Discovering a city’s hidden past is a great way to frame your practice.

All Images ©Tim Daly

1. Prince’s Dock

Melville’s account of arriving in the port of Liverpool is a vivid one and the author’s powers of observation are second to none.

His ship, The Highlander, squeezed into a berth at Prince’s Dock alongside merchant ships from the world over. Connected to Prince’s Half-Tide Dock, which has a series of lock gates to the Mersey, ships could access the river regardless of the tide.

The high-speed transport hub of its day, Prince’s Dock was rammed full of vessels, crew and goods. Nowadays, the dock, as pictured, still occupies the same footprint but stands at the cusp of an epic redevelopment. Chopped, trimmed and lined with new materials, it’s difficult to see any remaining signs of the 19th century. Features which made the city such a world-renowned trading centre have been replaced by identikit multistorey car parks and bland office headquarters.

2. Gated communities

At its peak, the port of Liverpool was importing and exporting goods from all corners of the earth. The docks were protected by thick perimeter walls, access through which was controlled via checkpoints. Melville’s account of lunchtime, when hundreds of sailors passed through the gates, describes a depressing line of beggars standing outside each day, appealing to the sailors’ charity as they walked into town. The solid walls still remain, as do many of the original granite gateposts like this one, but nowadays modified as access points to gated private housing and businesses. There’s an interesting parallel to be drawn between their former use and their purpose today.

3. Iconic locations

North of Prince’s Dock lie many of the maritime locations mentioned by Melville, serviced by one long continuous thoroughfare known locally as the Dock Road. Mothballed docks largely stripped of their former functions and purpose line the riverside awaiting redevelopment, but there’s a fascinating cluster of old warehouses and streets between the city and the new football stadium.

The jewel of this area is the bonded tea warehouse in Dublin Street, built in 1840 and now Grade II listed. One of the last remaining warehouses in the city that hasn’t been converted into apartments or a hotel, the building featured as a backdrop to photographic shoots of the Beatles and Barry Feinstein’s iconic images of Bob Dylan shot in 1966. The warehouse, pictured here, is still standing as a backdrop to more recent buildings and has a fascinating patinated surface.

 

Read more in issue 285.

If your images are looking flat and featureless, a sense of depth could transform them. Lee Frost shares his top tips for bringing them to life by adding that all-important third dimension.

1. Diminishing scale

Even though photographs can only record two dimensions, the human brain senses a third dimension because it understands the effect distance has on the size of an object. If you stand outside your house and look up at it, for example, the building will appear very large and imposing. Move 100m away, however, and it suddenly seems much smaller. This isn’t because the size of the house has physically changed, but because you’re further away from it. This principle is the basis of diminishing perspective. If you photograph an avenue of trees, each tree will appear slightly shorter than the last, even though they are all roughly the same size. Depth is therefore implied because we know that if the trees are getting smaller, it’s because they’re stretching off into the distance. The same effect can be achieved with a row of lamp posts, a long wall or any repeated features of a similar size.

2. Wide and close

To emphasise the diminishing-scale effect, move up close and use a wideangle lens. Doing this causes the repeated features to get much smaller much quicker. With an avenue of trees, for instance, the first tree will seem enormous and the last one tiny, while the gap between the trees seems to close up very quickly as the avenue stretches off into the distance, to the point that the last trees will appear to be touching.

3. Linear perspective

This type of perspective is best illustrated by the convergence of parallel lines formed by a straight road, railway tracks, pipelines, the furrows in a ploughed field and so on. Although the lines are roughly the same distance apart, they seem to get much closer together with distance. In fact, in a photograph, converging lines are one of the most powerful compositional aids, as they not only add a strong sense of depth, but they also carry the eye through the scene from foreground to background.

 

Find more tips in issue 284.