STILL LIFE 41 – SUNSET BESIDE THE TV

 

 

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As a photographer, I’m a strong believer in trying things out to see if they work.  Readers of this blog have said that I “push the envelope” with some of my pictures, and that’s what I like to do.  Many of these experiments end in total failure of course – and you don’t get to see those!  🙂   But some are half decent, and a blog is a wonderful vehicle for putting such things out to the world, to see what others think about them.

And it can work both ways.  Some things that I’ve thought ok have gone down like lead balloons, while others that I’ve really hesitated to publish at all have drawn positive feedback.
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Having mostly used big DSLRs, I’ve recently embarked upon the adventure of a new format of digital camera, a decidedly smaller, mirrorless Fujifilm X-T1 – and I’m both impressed by this new hardware and enjoying the process of getting to know how it functions.  And one of the ways in which I get to know a new camera, aside from actually taking pictures with it, is simply to sit at home, endlessly playing with the controls, getting to know what does what and where everything is – getting towards using it a little instinctively, rather than having to think what I’m doing all the time.

And so to these abstract pictures.  Our living room window faces west, and I was sitting on the sofa practicing with the X-T1 when the sun sank to the horizon and flooded the room with golden light.  The room has pale orange walls anyway, and so the addition of all that orange light really warmed and brightened things up – it was fabulous just being there.  The light was glancing across the front of our ancient TV and striking the chimney breast and, with the X-T1 in manual mode, I looked through it at the blazing but out of focus wall opposite – and was struck by what I was seeing.

So, here are some of the resulting abstracts, taken using the 55-200 lens, and lightly processed in Lightroom.  I’ve added some grain in one or two instances, and cropped some of them too.  They are blurred impressions of coloured light and shadow.  They show very little detail but then, is detail always important?  They show impressions of a scene, a moment – sunset beside the TV – they remind me of what it was like being there.

And do I vastly admire the work of JMW Turner?  Of course I do – he has always been a huge inspiration, and not least because he didn’t have a camera, nor even a TV for that matter, he just did it all using his eyes, hands, paints and sheer genius – wow!  So to finish, here is a favourite quote from him (which has always influenced me more than a little!):

I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like.

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