Today I am starting my very personal series of articles called “My X Photographs”. In this weekly series I will be sharing with you my own images captured with the Fujifilm X series cameras. New photographs, but also images “rediscovered”, found deep inside of my own Lightroom archives. Every week I will be writing about one particular photograph. I will share the settings of my camera and lens, but I will also talk about something much more important: about the reason why I am satisfied with this particular photograph.
WHY?
It is a question that we ask ourselves way to rarely. Why do we photograph what we photograph? Why do we produce the images we do? Why do we decide to publish any given photograph publicly? I am convinced that asking ourselves “why?” more often is a great way of improving our photography. It is all about these moments of self-reflection. They are a true inspirational goldmine. And starting today I am going to share these moments with you.
I hope these snippets of my personal thoughts will inspire you to get deeper into your own photographic process. And for those of you who are new to photography, or to the Fujifilm X system, I hope you will be able to learn something new from these weekly articles.
Let’s start!
DATE AND LOCATION
September 9, 2013. Lucerne, Switzerland.
CAMERA AND LENS
Fujifilm X100S (built-in 23mm f/2 lens)
SETTINGS
ISO 200, 23mm, f/8, 1/105sec, exposure compensation: 0, flash did not fire
WHY DID I TAKE THIS PHOTOGRAPH?
I love capturing daily life of the place I am living in. We often tend to think that our “own yard” is extremely boring and there is nothing interesting happening here. Trust me, this assumption is completely wrong. If you like the place you live, your town, your street… make sure you capture it regularly on your photographs. It is your memories for the future: in 10, 20 years it will look very different and you will be able to look at your images and remember how it used to look years and years ago. And there is so much going on… every single detail of your neighbourhood deserves to be captured on a photograph. They all live their own life. Not only the people, but also the buildings, the streets, parks and rivers. The dogs, the cars… the sky. Look for things that catch your eye, that make you feel curious and excited. Keep looking.
It was a very sunny and very warm afternoon. One of the main squares in the city was covered with a mosaic of harsh shadows. It was exactly these shadows which caught my eye and I immediately felt that it would make for an interesting black and white image. Harsh light and deep, black shadows tend to work fine on b&w photographs. Especially if you like them and I am a big fan of contrasty images, I find it visually very appealing.
WHY DO I THINK THIS PHOTOGRAPH DOES “WORK”?
When looking at this image my eyes tend to “wander around”. It is not one of those images, where your attention is immediately drawn to one particular subject. No. On the contrary, here it is all about busy city life, about people walking around, about the bikes standing in the middle of the square, about the windows of the buildings, and about these wonderful, majestic trees casting their shadows on the square. It is a busy composition, but it was also my intention, to make the viewer examine all the tiniest details of the entire image.
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS?
Drop a comment below. Let me know what you think about this particular photograph. How did YOU react to it? I find it extremely fascinating to know how different people differently react to our images. Hope you enjoyed this post!
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