Experiments in Light

“Monochrome Chess” : Hiroshima, 10th July 2010

I submitted this photo in a contest over at Digital Photography Review last year, the first and only time I’ve ever entered such a contest. There was no particular theme, just as long as the image was black and white, and I was very surprised to get a placing in the top ten out of more than a hundred entries.

Even more amusing were the notes the judge left discussing the technical merits of my photograph. From what he said, he must have imagined that I carefully thought out the shot beforehand and then executed it with a camera mounted on a tripod, in ‘mirror up’ mode and using a wireless remote to minimize motion blur, followed by a lengthy session in Photoshop.

In reality, I was sitting in a cafe with a friend and his young daughter, and we set up a game on the beautiful glass chess set to try to teach her the rudiments. I just happened to have my Nikon D90 with me, and took a few snapshots of them both, before realising that the chess set itself might make a nice study. Too lazy to crouch down and take at the level of the board, I just fired it off at random ‘from the hip’ without checking any of the camera’s settings or even looking through the viewfinder. The whole creative process from inception to realisation must have taken about ten seconds to complete. Furthermore, I didn’t even crop the image, let alone use any post-processing. It’s a ‘straight out of the camera’ JPEG file!

This is funny, because the folks over at Digital Photography Review are famous for their conservatism and religious adherence to the technical minutiae of the process rather than the artistic side of the pursuit – the polar opposite to my approach.

This just goes to show that it is the impulsiveness and spontaneity rather than technical prowess that are most important in photography as an art form.

You can see a larger version of this picture here.

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