Simple versus fussy

Simple and severe versus light and fluffy. Two different bicycle photos and two different styles.

While walking around Old Town Albuquerque, I liked the starkness of a bicycle against a plain adobe wall. Although there's not much in the picture, there's a lot of movement via diagonal lines.

The base of the picture is a diagonal line leading our eye right to left and back, echoed by the slight diagonal line of the bike.

Then there's the top of the adobe wall that angles downward.

The parallel lines on the roof bit lead our eye one way and then another via diagonal lines.

And then there's the sign/signpost, the one vertical, solid element that holds everything together.

A deceptively simple composition that has a lot going on.

But not as much going on as the busy, colorful, floral-decorated bike in front of an antique shop in Port Gamble, Washington.

Here, too, are lots of diagonal lines, but because of the busy subject matter, we don't notice much movement in this shot. Our eyes become fixated with all the flowers on the bike, and we tend to just quickly glance around the frame and then come right back to the bike.

It's National Bicycle Month. A perfect month to find, ride, and photograph bikes.

All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you for your understanding and kindness.

One or one hundred . . .

The simplicity of one can be just as appealing (to me) as the wackiness of 100 . . .

Here's a photo of a single bike in front of a wall in Cambridge, England and then a shot of at least 100 bikes waiting to be rented on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

This ends my week o' bikes. And I end it with a quote from Albert Einstein: "Life is like riding a bicycle — in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving."

©Carol Leigh
 All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Civility . . .

They are ever so polite in England. A simple "please" often works wonders.

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Cyclists in Spring Revisited

Remember yesterday's bike photo? If not, it's here at the bottom. Well, I got to thinking . . .

Could I create a photomontage that's composed sort of the same way? So I used photographs of an old oil painting (for the canvas texture), vintage Japanese papers, hand-stained paper (that I stained with coffee and tea), a hand-painted piece of paper (the blue and black bits of the "sidewalk"), and a couple of circles I'd cut out of manila paper and then painted.

So do you see it? The two cyclists, the painted sidewalk lines in the street, the patch of grass, the bit of sidewalk?

And you thought I had nothing more to do these days than pack! Ha!

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Cyclists in spring . . .

A lovely spring morning in Portland, Oregon. Looking down from our hotel room a number of years ago I was watching lives going by and ended up really liking this shot. I like the pair of cyclists, the strong parallel lines running diagonally, which contrast nicely with the  curving arrow coming down from the top of the frame.

Ah, spring. And May is just about (to me) the loveliest month of the year to be here.

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Complementary colors . . .

Bike against a college campus wall in Cambridge, England. Naturally, it was the red box and the green grass that caught my eye first, dramatic spots of color in an otherwise monochromatic scene.

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

National Bike Month continues . . .

In celebration of National Bike Month, I'm posting bicycle-related pictures every day this week.

This is a sign I found in Cambridge, England a few years ago . . . Apparently there are a few anti-cyclists here and there.

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Sow's Ear/Silk Purse

It's sort of drummed into us photographers that if you begin with a bad photo, no amount of tweaking and altering will make it a good photo. And yeah, that's usually the case. But every once in awhile the angels sing and you can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

(To produce something refined, admirable, or valuable from something which is unrefined, unpleasant, or of little or no value.)

Chris and I were wandering around Silverton, Oregon and I saw a bicycle in front of a store. You can see what I saw in the second photo below. And yes, it's a ho-hum picture. The lighting was rather dull. The background was fussy. And you can even see my light-colored pants and dark sweater reflected in the glass just over the handlebars.

Normally I would automatically delete such a photo. But then I wondered just what could I do with it? I basically liked the bike.

I created this a number of years ago and don't remember everything I did, but I know I added some contrast, added some texture, added more content on the far left and right sides of the picture (the picture was wonky, so I rotated it, cropped it, and you see the white background/empty space on either side in the original photo). I also darkened the edges, added some shading, and then added an arrow in the upper right.

Why did I add the arrow? Because I purposely placed the bike more to the left side of the frame than the right to give it "moving room," room to coast into the frame. To emphasize that left-right movement, what better than to put an arrow in the shot? It's subtle, it blends in, and it's appropriate.

You can still see me reflected in the glass, but if I hadn't told you the reflection was there, you probably wouldn't have noticed it, and you wouldn't have recognized it as a person standing there.

Bottom line? Yes. I began with a boring photograph. But with a bit of tweakage and Photoshop legerdemain, I managed to transform it into a picture that has richness and depth. And it's one that I printed, framed, and have as part of a grouping on my living room wall. And it looks good!

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

May is National Bike Month

It's National Bike Month! Ride in style!

©Carol Leigh
 All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Yes, more from Cambridge

Everything I've posted in this blog so far from Cambridge, England was taken on day one. And there are lots more! So I shall cease and desist, posting new ones just every so often. I'll be creating individual galleries on my Flickr site, however, and will post a link to them here once I've set them up.

I concentrated a lot on bicycles, since that (and architecture) seems to be a HUGE theme in Cambridge, and here are three examples. Signs, too, were fun to shoot, including the IN/OUT signboard at St. John's College. A bit of brick and stone architectural detail (I like the contrast in texture and the diagonal triangle), and a blue porcupine gracing an arch at Sidney Sussex College finish out the mix.

For me and Chris, this was a special trip, and we're grateful to have had the chance to see and experience a different way of life. ©Carol Leigh