Scott Sewell, one of our member photographers, has been touring Europe with his wife and has periodically emailed selected images taken along the journey. Any of us on such a trip might be clicking away at random scenes without giving a lot of thought to it, but there is much to notice in how a seasoned photographer selects and composes his views. Lighting will always be a challenge, but selecting the right viewing angle with respect to the direction of natural lighting can produce striking effects, and framing an image that has a good distribution of shapes and values, something a painter might strive to accomplish, can make a huge difference in creating a memorable photograph.

Let's examine Scott's recent set of images we received. Scott starts this sector of his journey in southern Wales, stopping first at a town called llfracombe, a "quaint coastal town. It does have a rather amazing piece of artwork (sculpture) called "Verity" at the entrance to its harbor," says Scott.

The photos in the section below are numbered from L - R. Note in photo 1 how the sunlight comes from beyond Verity, making the sculpture appear as a dark silhouette rising up from the complementary darks of the earth, and enhanced by the mid-values and lights of the overhead clouds. Good composition. Interesting details of this sculpture by Damien Hirst are given in Wikipedia:

The statue depicts a pregnant woman holding aloft a sword while carrying the scales of justice and standing on a pile of law books. Half of the sculpture shows the internal anatomy of the pregnant woman, with the foetus clearly visible. The stance has been described as a reference to Little Dancer of Fourteen Years by Edgar Degas, a c. 1880 work that previously inspired Hirst when he created Virgin Mother, another massive sculpture of a pregnant woman with her foetus exposed.

Photograph 2 was taken in Dartmoor National Park. "If you wonder what a moor is (Sherlockian’s take note), here is a panorama of the moorland we crossed through. The yellow flowers are “Gorse” – a prickly plant that is one of the main plant types found in English moors. The ground and plants here 

retain large amounts of water and many areas are swampy and dangerous." The moors are framed as a large scene to get a sense of the loneliness. The balance and distribution of mid-range lights and darks are good, and the central image of the almost brush covered creek draws the eye through the image.

Next, Scott stayed nearby in "Exeter, one of the oldest cities in England. It originally was a walled Roman settlement. It has one of the largest cathedrals in the country and the largest open roof span of any church in the world." In Photograph 3, the commanding passageway of the massive, vaulted ceiling focuses the eye deeper into the image, toward the darkened altar area at the far end. No detail is visible there, but we may imagine statues or paintings, gold candlesticks, lavish tilework, as an area of ancient ritual. Again, the image has a full, balanced range of lights and darks and any intricate details are subsumed by the overarching presence of the mesmerizing, vaulted ceiling.

Before starting on his trip north to Cardiff in Wales, Scott stopped in Greenway, England to visit "Agatha Christie’s house on the Dart River. This was an interesting and informative stop, particularly if you are a fan of her books (all 66 of them)." Notice in Photograph 4 that Scott chose his direction for photographing the house so that the right wall of the house and porch area seem to emerge from a dark background area of trees and shrubs, (the template cropped some background) from the wider, landscape view of the original photograph) to unify the composition of the image. Again, a complete range of distributed dark, middle and light value areas.

After his long trip to Wales, Scott visited Cardiff Castle. Note in Photograph 5 the somber, powerful view of the castle, made so much more dramatic by a subdued lighting against the projecting planar surfaces. Perhaps in this case it might have been artificial lighting, but the angle of the photograph was well chosen to add the drama of a massive hulk of a fortress sitting on strategic, raised ground. Values range from the lit forward stone walls, to the mid-value ultramarine blue sky, to the darkened castle sidewalls and earthen banks beneath the castle. Good composition achieved.