I think I’m developing a new aspect of my photographic style.

It’s not “everything sharp”. It’s not a close-up detail with blurred background either.

Motive sharp, everything else gone

Everything sharp

Those two used to be my mainstays; now, I’m doing something that’s a detail of the wider scene, sometimes sharp, and sometimes with the planes separated by depth of field or geometry.

Basically, instead of a berry or an insect or a bird isolated by the depth of field, I separate a piece of the scenery. You’d expect me to do it with a longer focal length, but I sometimes do it with an ultrawide, too.

I started doing it more than a year ago, and I’m noticing it just now; I went through my recent photos and they didn’t look like my typical stuff, and I asked myself why.

They still have the same atmosphere like my other stuff, though. It’s just that the technical and compositional aspect seems to have evolved.

I think I developed this technique because I stopped giving a shit about what anyone online would think. You see, it’s actually hard to learn new things if you maintain an online presence, because people like seeing the stuff you’re doing well, and they don’t like seeing the transitional stuff that’s not necessarily good – or, more accurately, it’s bad by necessity, because you’re learning, and when you’re learning you’re not getting everything right. So, you kind of tend to produce more of the stuff you’re good at, in order to avoid criticism, and by doing so you don’t improve. You learn how to insulate yourself against criticism online very quickly; basically, you check your work for things someone might object to, and you post the most polished versions of the stuff that got you the most praise. There were a few years when I tended to do that. It actually improved my technique; I learned how to get perfect sharpness when things needed to be perfectly sharp, and how to get perfect blur when they needed to be blurred out. However, it had a drawback – I stopped taking pictures I felt were good, when I knew people wouldn’t get the point quickly enough. I stopped taking specific atmospheric shots that were not compositionally obvious enough for the online audience. However, at some point, I stopped giving a shit to the point where I am now revisiting those things, the aspects of photography where I never practiced enough to get really good at them because I knew other stuff would be better received.

I also shoot more black&white now, and I tend to include humans and their artefacts in the pictures more, instead of trying to create an impression of untouched nature. It’s not that I never did that before, but I usually avoided it. I now treat humans like bugs or squirrels – they just happen to be there, as parts of the scenery.

It’s not that I abandoned my old forms – I still do “everything sharp, no human presence, pure nature, wide scenery” pictures, as well as my standard closeup portraits of tiny things. It’s just that I also do the things in between.

I took the FE 135mm f/1.8 and A7RV for a walk tonight. I thought, it there’s going to be any motives, they are going to require a long lens, and I was right. I didn’t want to take the 100-400mm, because it’s slow and I would have ran out of light much sooner.

The results were much better than I expected, because I didn’t really expect anything; the sun sets earlier now, and it was cloudy all day so I expected a grey mess, and instead I got very nice colours.

I was just thinking about something that changed in the way I take pictures.

At some point, I used to try to take pictures that would show the equipment in the most advantageous light. Partially it was because I was writing equipment reviews for a photography e-zine, but also because I subconsciously tried to avoid criticism of not being a good enough photographer to get the best out of the gear. I tried to make the pictures look as spectacular as possible, regardless of what I actually liked.

At some point, I stopped caring about that, because it made me feel stupid. Did I buy the camera to do the stuff I want to do, or did the camera buy me in order to show off its capabilities? Sure, I like making spectacular images occasionally. However, something I like making completely unspectacular images of nothing in particular because it reflects my mood, or captures some idea. However, I initially took pictures without any regard for the audience, then started taking pictures in order to prove something and impress the audience, and now I’m back at doing it for myself and not giving much thought to what anyone would say.

For instance, here are two versions of the same place, from different parts of the summer. The first is when the lavender was blooming and I was taking pictures of butterflies there with an ultra-wide lens, which is a weird thing to do, but I felt like doing it because I got bored of doing it the “right way”, with a telephoto.

The second picture is at the end of the summer. The lavender is gone, the butterflies are gone, and even the sun is gone at the end of the day, and there’s nothing there but stone walls, fence, dry grass, and emptiness. This emptiness is the subject matter of the picture – everything that was worth looking at is gone, and what remains is what caught my attention, and I photographed it in very dark black&white tonality to showcase the total, utter absence of anything meaningful.

How am I supposed to do that? By using all the colour the camera is capable of capturing? Despite the fact that there’s nothing of colour there? Am I to try to capture it in a dynamic way, making a composition that tries to engage the audience? Why? There’s nothing dynamic there. It’s exactly the static, empty remainder of a once colourful scenery that caught my eye. Photographing it in the most static way possible, that accentuates the stillness that remains when everything meaningful is gone, is the exact point of that picture. It’s not supposed to evoke colourful and dynamic sentiment, it’s supposed to evoke the emptiness one feels playing Witcher 3, visiting Kaer Mohren after the main mission is complete, and everything is as you left it, only without anything that used to give it meaning. The people are gone, the meaning is gone, but for some reason the lights are still on. You don’t photograph this with Velvia or EBX; you photograph it with the most depressing kind of Ilford B&W. It’s not supposed to showcase the gear. The gear is merely a shovel that moves the manure. It’s not the subject matter of the picture. In some pictures, the gear is the obvious part of the composition; the first thing people will ask is what gear that was taken with, because it looks spectacular. In some cases, however, the picture could be taken with anything, and the gear is supposed to be the last thing on your mind when you look at it.

It started raining here, finally. I was really worried about the vegetation at this point because everything was dying, not to mention the increasing fire hazard, with wildfires breaking out sporadically, and it was only a matter of time when everything would go up in flames.

Last evening we went out to take pictures, and the silky texture of the sky was nice, but the colours were very poor, so we processed the pictures in b&w, for the most part.

It’s Sveta Nedilja, of course. Some time ago they finished the road from Dubovica to Sveta Nedilja, which means it’s now easily within reach, but unfortunately the road no longer feels like wilderness. It’s as if the humans extended their civilization to that part now by building the road, and the feeling of the place has fundamentally changed, and not for the better. We tried walking on the paved road but soon gave up.

As you can see, I’ve been doing lots of black&white photography lately. I’ve also been doing lots of strong colour photography lately, as well. Sometimes it’s a matter of mood, and sometimes colour doesn’t actually do anything constructive, so I remove it. Sometimes, like last night, colour actually detracts from the image; it would merely draw attention to the fact that the colours don’t look “clean”. The silvery gray tones, however, were lovely.

I took the 85mm lens with me, and it was probably too tight for some of the motives. However, the ones that did work ended up being very nice compositions. 50 or even 35mm would probably work as well, or better, but that’s the thing about using primes: they force you to think about what you can do with what you have, not allowing you to just change focal length instantly if it doesn’t seem to work. Also, when they don’t work, they make you remember why.

The Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art looks like a strange choice for this, since people think of it in terms of being a portrait lens, but to me, it’s mostly a lens that allows me to see in the dark while staying in the short telephoto range, and it also allows me to use depth of field to separate landscape into layers, rather than having everything sharp. In this case, however, I didn’t avail myself of this option, because the scene required everything to be sharp. I’m actually very satisfied with how the scene turned out, considering how unlucky we were with the colours. The bright part of the sunset throwing sparks turned out really well. Composing sun into a street lamp looks somewhat Instagramy, but I couldn’t resist. 🙂