No such luck

I’ve been looking back over some partially drafted blog posts that haven’t yet made it to the publication and this one caught my eye.  I usually dip into the archives or the drafts folder when things are quieter for me photographically, but actually I’ve been pretty busy on that front lately – it just happens that a lot of the photography I’ve been doing is stuff that I can’t (yet) show here.  All going well over the next two weeks, if the weather cooperates, I should get to try a bit more landscape photography again.   In the meantime I should talk a little about today’s photo.

This was captured at Shelbourne Park last April on a night out at the dogs.  Having had varied success at capturing the dogs themselves, I focused on trying to pick a winner for a few races, and failing miserably, thought the collection of torn betting slips from the Tote (I wasn’t the only one at our table struggling to pick a winner) made for a good story-telling image.

I don’t need to tell you what a story-telling image is – it does exactly what it says on the tin (in that it helps to tell a story – oops, I just told you) – and can play a particularly important role in holding together a set of images built around a theme.  For me, the story or theme is often centered around a wedding when I’m looking for, and capturing, images like this, but for any sort of a documentary or photojournalistic project you’re going to find some images that have the qualities of that above.

The image isn’t particularly remarkable on its own, it doesn’t have a very obvious subject, it’s not pretty, and there’s nothing funky going on in terms of the exposure.  But it’s pretty clear from even a quick glance at it what it’s about and (if you take a slightly longer glance at it) even where it was taken.

The wedding equivalent is often something a bit more formal, such as the menu on the table in the reception room, or the cards on the mantelpiece in the living room of the bride’s family home.  Every other sort of photographic project around a theme has potential for images like this to help to hold the set together.  Sometimes, although they are the least remarkable images in every other respect, they can have the most impact, because they can involve photographing the obvious, but by isolating a detail like this you give it more weight than it can otherwise have.

You might just look at it and think – yeah, it’s the running order for the dogs and a few torn pieces of paper – and yes it is just that.  But for the photographer who is trying to learn to “see” images that already there in front of him or her, experimenting with shots like this, as I was doing on that night after trying the more exciting action-based dog shots earlier, is certainly a good exercise.