What do I love most about deep suburb, living on the city's rim? Urban Varsovians have their little balconies and their podwórka, I have this. The sublime. Man and nature in spiritual and aesthetic harmony.
This
post prompts me to talk about the use of polarising filters in
photography. The circular polariser allows one to get bluer skies. Is
this trickery? My view is this. On sunny days, I'm wearing polarised
sunglasses. They give this effect. This is how the world looks like to
me. So when I photograph my world, I want a subjective record of how a
given scene looked and felt to me; I want to conjure up the same
atmosphere/mood/feeling I got when looking at the scene.
The
same applies to tweaks in Photoshop. As well as judicious cropping and
compressing, I use Photoshop to make my photos more vivid - this is
usually done by increasing contrast and saturation a touch, and reducing
brightness a touch. My aim in doing so is to bring the emotional impact
of the photo closer to that which I felt at the time.
As
you can see, the blueness of the sky varies from photo to photo. This
depends on the camera angle. If you point your thumb towards the sun and
form a right angle with your forefinger, it will point to the darkest,
bluest part of the sky - and the polarising filter will exaggerate this
effect. Of course, you need a single lens reflex (SLR) type camera to
see the sky darkening and lightening in the viewfinder as you turn the
filter.
How
do we keep our garden looking so beautful, you are all asking
yourselves. My secret - I do not do a hand's turn but leave it to the
professionals who know what they're doing. Eats quite a hole into the
family budget over the summer months, but hey! it's worth it.