52 Projects week 10: Layer Up!

May 6, 2023May 6, 2023 Tim Moss52 weeks, black and white, GR3, layers, Melbourne, monochrome, people, Photography, Ricoh, street, urbanLeave a comment

Here we are in week 10 of following the projects in the book 52 Assignments: Street Photography by Brian Lloyd Duckett.

It’s been more than a week since the last installment of this project – the reality is that life got in the way for a while there! Visitors at home, weekends away, and uncooperative weather meant a delay to the next assignment.

In a way that was good though because it meant I had plenty of time to sit with the ideas and work out how I would respond. The instructions for this assignment suggest this approach, challenging us to take a decent amount of time to practice the technique.

That technique is, as you might guess from the title, layering – having a number of different ‘scenes’ located on different planes (e.g. foreground, middle-ground, background) within the same image. The theory is that this adds depth, volume, and interest. The really challenging part is to make sure that all of the layers interact with each other in some way – it’s got to be deliberate. That’s the bit that took some time! Even more challenging, the task this time was to produce not one, not five, but TEN images!

Over a couple of trips to the city, I walked around with this idea in mind, and my Ricoh GRIII in hand for quick response. Pleased to say I’ve managed to reach the required quota, and enjoyed the process of trying to line up two or three different elements at the same time – it’s like “the decisive moment” but with the difficulty turned up a notch!

Here are my ten ‘layered’ images – let me know your thoughts…

52 Projects week 9: No Shades of Grey

April 2, 2023 Tim Moss52 weeks, black and white, GR3, Melbourne, monochrome, people, Photography, Ricoh, street, urbanLeave a comment

Here we are in week 9 of following the projects in the book 52 Assignments: Street Photography by Brian Lloyd Duckett.

I’ve skipped a week here in terms of following the book, because that assignment had a longer time scale… now that we are making progress through the book, I’m discovering a few more like that, where the brief is to investigate a theme over a month (or longer!)… so those assignments might go on the back burner and then emerge fully formed after some time has elapsed!

Meanwhile, with an hour to spare, Sharon and I took a quick trip to Fitzroy to explore a more focused assignment, this one titled ‘No Shades of Grey’. The challenge here was to produce six images that were extremely high contrast, playing with large amounts of black and white within the frame to produce interesting shapes, angles, and contrasts between different elements. I took my trusty Ricoh GR for this assignment, as it has such a fantastic high contrast black and white mode that I rarely need to go beyond the jpegs into the raw files. As luck would have it, I ended up with exactly six images that I felt reflected the theme, with the last taken just as we were heading back to the car.

I hadn’t been feeling all that well this weekend, a combination of work stress, fatigue, and the usual post-treatment issues, but this was a great example of the fact that sometimes it’s good to push yourself to create, even if just for a short amount of time – I find there’s no better ‘cure’ for stress and physical issues than putting on the ‘creativity’ hat and seeing what flows.

Probably not my strongest set of images, but it felt like something of an accomplishment nonetheless.

52 Projects week 4: Have a ‘no viewfinder’ day

February 19, 2023February 19, 2023 Tim Moss52 weeks, black and white, Malvern, Melbourne, people, Photography, Ricoh, street, urbanLeave a comment

Here we are in week 4 of following the projects in the book 52 Assignments: Street Photography by Brian Lloyd Duckett.

Took a few weeks off there – the demands of my day job, plus a long-overdue (for me) road trip, meant I wasn’t able to attend to a project. I’m back now though!

Sharon joined again this week, where we explored the ‘no viewfinder’ prompt. The task is to spend half a day taking photos without composing using your viewfinder or the back of your camera at all. Just stick the camera out in front of you and see what happens. This is a good opportunity to play with different camera angles, and see just how interesting some of the ‘happy accidents’ can be. I was really pleasantly surprised with this technique. In some ways it reminded me of film photography, in that it really separates the act of taking images from the subsequent review and editing process, and that’s quite nice in terms of getting ‘into the groove’ of noticing. But film photography requires great care and attention to composition and exposure so as not to waste film, whereas this was more spontaneous and free ranging. Sharon and I spent an hour or so walking the streets of Malvern together, and then I spent another half hour or so in the CBD to see what else might come my way. The results are below – there was no ‘quota’ or limit this week, so there are a few more shots this week than usual!

Malvern: