July 2021 - Monochrome cones

The lockdown gave me the opportunity and the incentive to take a lot of indoor photographs. But I didn’t plan on escaping the natural world completely, so one of my projects was to photograph cones – not the sort that make your life go by so slowly on a motorway, but those that grow on trees.

I tried laying them out in a sort of still life pattern, but my artistic eye failed me on this: they just looked like a few cones on a table with no great merit. And seeing them in colour was, of course, a disappointment. Cones don’t have much colour – they are predominantly grey with maybe a few remnants of the red or brown they had when they were young. So, I decided to convert the pictures to black and white (or mono as we photographers call it … it sounds more professional). 

This first picture is of a large cone that I had decorating a shelf in my office at home. I placed it slightly to the left of centre because that makes you think a bit more; again, this is the psychology of images (paintings or photographs) where an off-centre subject gives a feel of dynamism to the picture, slightly unsettling. I had it placed on white paper with a white board behind it – so that there would be no distraction from the cone. But I didn’t like the effect that gave (especially because I could see the join where the paper met the board), and so I used a bit of Photoshop magic to put a different paper background in and used another bit of magic to make sure that I didn’t lose the shadow. Very satisfying!

This last photo is a still life and is one of my more-than-just-a-flop pictures. I did do a fair amount of processing to the picture to give it that rather unnatural sharpness and to bring out the grain in the wooden bowl.

A different type of photos from what I normally do, but very satisfying to be able to create something new that I had never tried before. A quote from a book I am just reading puts it well:

“He had asked, “What do youth know with so little experience?” 

And the other had replied, “What have the mature forgotten about the value of change?” “

Change of any sort can be disruptive, but on the other hand it can also lead to new, worthwhile things.