To my considerable astonishment, Alan Ross recently started following me on Twitter. Although I had come across his images before, I didn’t know he was on Twitter until then; I am (of course!) following him now too. I really like the subtlety of his images, which for me are not ‘in your face’ ‘wow’ photographs – excuse the crudity of this description: it relates to debates in the Great British Landscapes magazine (see especially here and here) – but are long drawn out intakes of breath in appreciation at the compositions, tones and textures. Even in small sizes on a computer screen, I can look at his photographs for ages, and I encourage you to take some time to explore his gallery. I’d love to see some of his printed work sometime.
Alan posts new images regularly, sometimes daily, but there is no way I can keep up with that, given that I have a full-time job that has nothing to do with my photography. But he also suggests a challenge, that he tags as ‘#PostAPhotoFriday‘ – the idea being that sharing a photograph with this tag every Friday enables others to see your efforts (of course, he posts his own images too). For example, here is his message from last week:
I think this is an inspired idea: a weekly post should usually be a manageable time frame for me, even with a full time job, and because I think I need the discipline of a time frame to make sure I regularly put images out there for people to see and critique, I’m going to try and follow Alan’s suggestion. So, below is my first of these Friday photos, on the beach at the bottom of my road. This was taken whilst out walking with Alastair Cook at the beginning of October, with autumnal skies and tones. It’s on Kodak T-Max 400 (that expired in July 2009), using my medium format Mamiya and an 80mm lens. To me it looks a bit like a drunk has staggered along the beach before us (I assure you these prints are not Alastair’s – nor mine!).
Finally, I heartily recommend following Alan on Twitter and taking time for studying the images on his website!
Portobello beach - but not my footprints!
Of course, I’m always open to comments – but if they’re about this image, can I request that you comment in the gallery location instead (clicking on the image also takes you to the gallery image). Comments on this blog posting can be made below as usual. Thank you!
