(click on the picture to make it bigger)
Common advice to aspiring novel and screen-writers is to keep asking the question:
What If,
at every key point in the plot. What happens if her keys fall down a drain, what happens if he doesn’t pay that debt, what will he do if she spurns his advances, what will the gangster’s head honcho do to me if I really have left the bag of money on the train?
A similar question is important for aspiring photographers, and it’s this one:
“I wonder what a photograph of that would look like”?
These thoughts occurred to me yesterday afternoon as I was on the beach looking for something to photograph that I hadn’t taken before. And there in a small, shallow pool of water with light rippling across it’s surface was a tiny blue shell. So I put my foot on the edge of the pool, rested the camera on it and took the shot. 5 shots in fact, but the other 4 were blurred. The result wasn’t what I expected, but I am rather pleased with it. I think it looks quite like a painting.
One of the great features of digital photography is that you can take as many pictures as you like, and it remains inexpensive. I tend to take about 400 when I go out for a walk with the dogs and this would cost a fortune if I were using film. And this brings me on to the difference between an amateur photographer and an expert one. The amateur asks the question above, the expert thinks:
“I know what a picture of that will look like”,
and then either takes the shot or doesn’t.
Cheers, Tom.