The Kalgoorlie Bush Two Up School

It's a an impressing colourful photo as sun goes down.

very warm hues and nice technique to retain details everywhere. The composition is plain odd but it works. This is one of my favourite photos in your folder.

Now some general comment about the work of yours I've seen so far.

You definitely have a style of your own and I like it. You use old tricks to produce technically perfect pictures, and you produce extremely dramatic colors. I like your way of doing what you do. My only concern is about the composition of your pictures. Some of them (not this one), although very dramatic and technically excellent, just lack interesting features in terms of composition. My advice (If I may be rude enough to give you one considering how good a photographer you are) is don't concentrate only on colors. But to be honest, you are so better than the vast majority of people who post pictures on this website.

Adrien,

Thanks for the comments - they are some of the most challenging I've ever had. I appreciate very much the way they have made me look more closely at the style of work I do.

A few days ago I did examine what I do and why I do it, after reading an article on the Luminous Landscape web site about composition. It made me realise that, in my favourite images, I rarely follow "THE RULES". I think you know which ones I'm refering to: the "Rule of Thirds", the "Lines Should Flow From Left To Right", the "Place A Red Object In The Frame", the "Colours Should Be Natural" and so on. I know them, I simply choose to ignore them when the subject dictates otherwise (and it often does!).

The comment about a lack of interesting features in terms of composition in my shots is particularly insightful. I'll ask you to expand a bit further on that, though I do think I understand what you mean. The vast majority of the people who come to the region that I live in also fail to find intersting features to put into their photographs - there really are no majestic mountains or sweeping waterways within 1000 kilometres of my home. I must make do with what I have about me. Usually, my subjects are small scale items such as trees, man made structures, large rocks, etc. etc. Since they in themselves are not usually strong enough to carry the picture, I compensate with strong colours or interesting light. By doing so, I try to make a balanced picture which has impact throughout, not just in the "featured subject" of the picture.

Of course, the obvious answer is to photograph a more interesting area: go some place where there are majestic mountains and sweeping waterways. Unfortunately, my day job as a geologist stops me from travelling as much as I'd like to. So I'm stuck here for the time being. Besides, where would the challenge lie in photographing something that everyone else can photograph (and already has)? (The challenge lies in doing it better, or at least differently.)

I am planning to leave the day job to become a full time landscape photographer. I think of my time here in Kalgoorlie as intense training, much like altitude training for athletes. If images from this "featureless" area can be made interesting, strong landscapes will be a breeze to shoot!

Once again, thanks for the comments and I look forward to reading more of them.

Graeme

www.graemehird.com

Joseph,

The image is combined from two trannies because the exposure value range from the scene greatly exceeded the tonal range of my film. If I had not used the method, the scene would have been a sunset photo with no foreground detail, or an iron shed with a blown-out sky.

Cheers,

Graeme

The rules of composition are not rules, they're guidelines. They were produced from an analysis of traditional Western painting, the kind that was established during the Renaissance, and which aimed at producing a 3D, realistic look. Follow the rules, and you'll get that look.

Yet the rules are, at bottom, just plain silly. Lines should go from left to right? That's because we Westerners read and wriet from left to right. Chinese photographers should presumably get their lines going from top to bottom. Rule of thirds? That's based on producing the illusion of space through perspective through producing a screen of diminishing rectangles. Poor old Picasso didn't know squat.

What I'm saying is, don't think you're missing something by ignoring the rules. You have a good eye, you don't need that particular set of visual crutches.

The truly ironic thing about the photogrpahers' rulebook is that at the very moment when it was being drawn up - in an attempt to make photogrpahy respectable as an art by making photos look more like paintings - artists were tearing the whole thing up and going back to the the per-renaissance, and to Asia and Oceania and Africa, to ernew the way they approached the world. Result: follow the rules as taught in the camera clubs, and you'll find yourself with a tried and tested formula for producing dull and unimaginative compositions.

Modus operandi, Graeme? Examplaris - 7!

Optima fide. S.M.