Play Makes Perfect

Humans learn most during their life in the period when they are most playful. Coincidence? I think not. Research shows that play teaches us vital knowledge about the way the world works and homes our problem solving skills as well as the relatively mundane fact that it teaches us about the game we are playing.

In a similar way experimenting with photographs we would not normally take increases our skill in all areas of photography. Experimentation teaches us more about our cameras and about properties of types of light we may one day encounter.

Take for example yesterday in Sherwood Forest. The afternoon light was too flat for me to take the types of photograph I normally thrive upon (I now know this was because of a build up of cloud cover before an evening snow storm). Instead of despairing I decided to experiment with a few panning shots to try and bring out the colours of the winter woodland whilst blurring out the ordered distractions of an overly-managed woodland.

Hopefully I not only got a few interesting shots but learned a few things in the process that will help my photography in the future. I guess it is too early to tell.

This evening I decided to play with another type of photography I rarely dabble in; physiograms. Physiograms are long-exposure photographs showing the regular patterns produced by the swing of pendulums.

My method of producing physiograms involves suspending a laser pen from the roof by string in a darkened room, setting it going with the camera on bulb, and waiting until the pendulum has come to an almost complete halt. It really is very simple and I would recommend anyone tries it

Subtly different configurations of string produce markedly different patterns, as does swinging the pen in different directions. Without mathematics incomprehensible to my poor biologist mind it is impossible to predict the final pattern until the exposure is complete.

Not only have I hopefully learned something applicable to Nature Photography from this experiment (I have no idea what!) and had a great deal of fun, but this also shows that biology does not have a monopoly on natural beauty. The combination of simple mathematical and physical laws can produce equally surprising and beautiful phenomena.