Jim Lovell Photography

When taking a picture, think about what it is that you want the viewer to see. Why are you taking the picture? How are you going to emphasise the subject? Minimising distractions is a good thing to try but you can also use leading lines: things in the scene to draw the viewer's eye in to the subject. Here are a couple of examples. The first one was taken at sunset on Bruny Island. I had my camera on a tripod, quite low down and just at the limit of where the waves were coming up the beach. There were some rocks with straight edges going down toward the waves so I put the camera between them. The rocks frame an open triangle pointing into the picture and hopefully lead the eye to the breaking wave and the land on the horizon. Something else that helps here is the long exposure (a few seconds I think). As the water rushes out it leaves foam and bubbles that blur and also create lines to lead the viewer's eye. Sunset at Adventure Bay, Bruny Island Here's another on

There's an interesting article by Nick Melidonis in the current issue of Better Photography magazine (no 67, p 94) on the artistic effect you can get with long exposures and deliberately moving the camera while taking the picture. It's a great way to simplify the image and emphasise colour and structure, well worth a read. Anyway, I thought I'd give it a try. We too a trip to Mt Field National Park recently and took a walk to Russell Falls. I had my iPhone with me and had been using the SlowShutter app to take a long-exposure photo of the falls. On the walk back down the path I decided to try a long exposure while walking. The photo below is an 8 second exposure. All I did was try to keep the point where the path disappeared into the distance at the same place. Anyway, I was pretty impressed with how it turned out. A small amount of editing was done using another app called Filterstorm to increase the contrast a little and saturate the colours. Path from the falls