‘A good photograph is knowing where to stand’

Apparently it was the American landscape photographer, Ansel Adams, who once said ‘A good photograph is knowing where to stand.’ And I certainly found that when a white crab spider on a cosmos caught my eye. I took more than a hundred photographs in my attempt to capture it. I don’t usually get this carried away with photographs of spiders, but I’ve never seen this species before. I was also being hampered by the wind and so the cosmos kept moving!

To add to my woes, the camera was confused by the whiteness of the spider, and when camera was happy, I wasn’t happy with the angle or the background. So before I knew it I had more than a hundred photographs of it! I am sure Ansel didn’t struggle like this.

I didn’t originally take it in black and white, but Ansel wouldn’t have been too impressed by my use of colour. He did undertake colour assignments, but much preferred to work in black and white. So I thought I’d convert into black and white for this post. Wasn’t too sure it would work, but actually I quite like it. What do you think?

Here’s an image compare to help you decide. You may also spot it’s a different perspective, and that a bee is risking its life!

Hope you liked today’s compare. And also hoping this might be the one to convince anyone who has not yet participated to join us! Only seven days left of July Squares, and there have been seventy eight different squarers so far, many of whom are taking part daily.

The theme is Perspective, which you can interpret anyway you want. Here are a few ideas though just in case you are not sure where to start;

• Art – the method by which solid objects drawn or painted on a flat surface are given the appearance of depth and distance.
• Geometry – the way that objects appear smaller when they are further away and the way parallel lines appear to meet each other at a point in the distance.
• Point of View – a particular way of considering (looking at) something or the capacity to view things in their relative importance
• Vista – seeing something over distance or time

In case anyone is curious about the spider. I will share another post in August with more photographs as well as some fascinating facts. It is a quite special spider for England, and was one of the reasons I first shared this via twitter for Brian’s last on the card.