OCA Course

400mm.

340mm.

300mm.

250mm.

200mm.

135mm.

100mm.

40mm.


17mm.

Scarborough harbour from Castle Dykes.

OCA Course

Scarborough Lighthouse - wide-angle image.
17mm.
The perspective is distorted by the wide view, and the pointing upward of the camera to enable the whole building to be included. There is a much better percepyion of depth, although the building appears unrealistically long, and the verticals un-naturally tilted. The backgound seems much further away than on the telephoto shot.


Scarborough Lighthouse - telephoto image.
210mm.

The perspective is compressed, with little indication of the length of the main building. There is no significant distortion of the verticals. The overall impression is of a relatively "normal" view, as we interpret the visual cues of a square, or oblong building with perpedicular walls, which this view gives.

OCA Course: A Sequence of Composition.

Iconic trademarks no longer seen.

Gleaming chromium.

Gorgeous paint-job.

All parts in working order.

Familiar names.

Famous brands.

Seductive curves.


I then moved on to photograph the "raison-d'etre" of the show, the beautifully restored examples of bygone days on the land. Most tractors are driven to destruction and dumped in the corner of a field or yard when finished with, so they often need a lot of restoration.


Or just thinking of times past.

Jealously eyeing the opposition.

And one wanting some TLC.

A rarity beautifully restored.

Some cast a critical eye.

Can I have one Dad?

"Chewing the fat"!

Discussing the merits and drawbacks.

There are some real characters around these shows, so I moved around the exhibits to try and catch a few unawares.

Junior reporters in relaxed mode.

Don't even think about it!

Lots of dust and wheelspin!

It's a "Tractor Pull", a challenge for owners to test the power of their tractor by pulling a sledge which increaes in weight as it is pulled down the course.

What's going on here?

Lots of tractors, large and small. This gives a general impression of what it's all about.

This is the UK Vintage Tractor Show, staged at Pickering, North Yorkshire. I saw a roadside advert and thought it might be interesting for a sequence. I didn't even have to pay the entry fee as there was no-one on the gate!
There are many agricultural people who take an interest in restoring old tractors and farm impliments, and they often exhibit their examples at local village shows, but this is the UK "biggy", and they come from all over the country to show, look, and trade.
I wandered around the event with a wide-angle, and a medium telephoto zoom, lenses, trying to look inconspicuous. I wanted to get an overall impression of the event, and of some of the characters, closing in eventually on the exhibits themselves and the painstaking effort that goes into their restoration. As I grew up on a farm, many of the exhibits were familiar. I learned to drive on a "Fergie"!
(These images are posted as e-mail size because of the number involved and the long upload times for anything over a few hundred kilobytes.)
This whole course is in danger of developing a tractor theme!

OCA Course

A different view.

Bottom right.

Left of centre.

Extreme bottom left.

Centre left.

In the middle.

Sawdon postbox.

As a right-handed person, the image with the box bottom right works for me, but a left-hander may think the converse! I actually like the vertical image with the extra element of the barn roof. If you stare at it long enough, it looks like a small house without windows.
Canon EOS 1D Mk111, 50mm F2.5 macro lens.

OCA Course - reading about photography.

Have just finished reading "On Photography" by Susan Snotrag (sorry, Sontag). (Penguin Books ISBN 978-0-141-03578-9). I daresay she makes some very good points and observations, but why, oh why do these so called pundits have to dress it all up with Thesaurian acrobatics instead of plain English? Liz Wells and contributors in "Photography: A Critical Introduction" (Routledge Press ISBN 10: 0-415-30704- X) are another bunch. Most of what they want to put over could be stated on two sides of A4 with space left over. I suspect most photographers don't have an honours degree in English Language, and anyone starting out in the game could be seriously discouraged by these people.
Less books (unless they have pictures in), more photography!
Rant over.

Exhibition.

Scarborough Art Gallery are currently running a photographic exhibition (I don't know what's got into them!) - "Return to Penumbria" by Adrian Gate, who has been a street photographer in northern cities for 30 years or so. Absolutely superb! Great humour and pathos. Much B&W work from the 70's nd 80's, but he was persuaded to revisit the streets recently with a digital compact camera. The interesting comparison between then and now is the subjects' attitude to being photographed - then it was idle curiosity, now it's often outright aggression to the photographer.
Well worth a visit.
The message: Find an interesting backdrop and see who (or what) walks into it, and be ready.

OCA Course: Fitting the frame to the subject.

Tall crop.


Square crop



Long crop.


Standard view.

Hotel in surroundings viewed from the harbour.


Close-up of detail.


Full-frame view.

These images are not neccessarily posted in the intended order! The Grand Hotel dominates the seafront of Scarborough's south bay and is an iconic town building, standing in monolithic fashion on the cliff, with it's entrance at street level in the town. These images were taken from the harbour lighthouse using a 17-40 mm wide-angle zoom, and a 100-400 telephoto zoom.