Clouds Studies

I have been thinking about how to proceed with my photoblog during the coronavirus lockdown. I feel that the stay at home advice is important for stopping the spread of the virus and whilst taking a few photographs on my daily exercise walk would not cause too much harm, it is not really supporting others and it is definitely not an essential activity.  I have therefore decided to leave the camera at home and only restart my photography when the lockdown is finished.

In the meantime I want to continue the blog. I have thought about doing some creative photography at home as one option for new material. I also have some pre-lockdown photographs that I haven’t yet published. Most of these are surface and texture studies in an abstract style. 

Another idea is going back to previous years not covered by this blog. In April and May 2013, I visited the Outer Hebrides and thought I might revisit this trip in a series of posts including reprocessing the photos from scratch. 

The final idea is posting some of my artwork. Art is something that I am able to progress during the lockdown and I have been busy both with painting and drawing. I am, however, only at the start of my art journey so there is some hesitancy in publishing the results ...but may be in the current context any naivety can be overlooked! 

For now, these are a small selection of cloud studies taken pre-lockdown. I had been taking images of skies primarily for my painting. Clouds have a mixture of hard and soft lines making them ideal for practicing watercolour techniques, particularly controlling the consistency of the paint and the wetness of the paper and brushes. They also make great abstract style photographs. The removal of contextual information like the horizon and land concentrates the composition on shapes, lines, light and shadow, colour and tone, making for a more interesting final image: