Seeing The Light

I Think I Just Reached My Brake Point

Photograph copyright: DAVID McMAHON

I guess you could call this my light-bulb moment. There I was, walking down Flinders Street with my camera around my neck, when I looked up.

One day someone is going to fit me with a sound effect borrowed from the screeching brakes employed by the old cartoons – because that’s exactly what happens when I have a camera in my hand. You just have to stop every time something catches your eye, which in my case is fairly often.

Because I was only a few steps away from St Paul’s Cathedral, I thought this light was actually on their property. But it wasn’t. It was attached to the exterior wall of the Meridian International School.

You know what really and truly caught my attention? Not so much the light globe itself, but the delicate craftsmanship on the old metal casing. And if you look carefully, you can even see the manufacturer's mark on each segment of the glass casing.


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Ray-Banter

Yep, I Had My Head In The Clouds

The response I received to the post Seeing The Light was very interesting. Several of the comments on the post - as well as a series of emails I received - asked how the photographs were taken. Well, as I mentioned earlier, I've been testing a couple of little Pentax cameras over the past fortnight. The shots of the Ray-Bans against a cloudy sky were taken with a Pentax Optio S10 - an ultra-compact, very slim camera that packs a lot of punch - 10 megapixels, no less.

Maybe it's my background in newspaper and magazine design/ layout, because I "saw" the image in my head before I started taking the shots. Often, that's half the battle when it comes to creativity. But because I knew precisely what I wanted, it was just a question of hitting the trigger.

In answer to your queries, I held the Ray-Bans aloft in my left hand and I had the camera in my right hand. When you think about it, that's a really interesting scenario, because it's not often that the camera and the object being photographed are actually up in the air and therefore subject to a certain degree of human unsteadiness.

I shot about 24 frames, then reviewed each of them on my computer so I could check the overall clarity. I wanted one image to show the clouds through the lenses of Ray-Bans and a second image along the same lines, except that I wanted the details of the glasses (gold frames and the little plastic nose pieces) in sharp focus.

Photography - like any branch of art - can be as complicated as you make it, or as simple as you make it. Simplicity gets my vote - every time.