It's tough job, but someone has to do it - I have a group of photographers with me in Menorca at the moment and what a lively bunch they are. All levels of experience, but all dead keen.Today we’ve been out on the island visiting a farm – not a tourist in sight – before taking a walk around the interesting little town of Mercadel. There’s a white-painted church there and I have often photographed it before. But in front of the church used to be some cactus which could be used as a really dramatic foreground. Someone has ‘improved’ things by cutting down these cactus and replacing them with a hideous concrete path with lights that look like small dustbins. Without a good foreground the church appears very plain and uninteresting from the outside.
Not to be beaten, I simple found a bunch of wild poppies – they are weeds here – cut a few off and held them in front of the camera. The idea being to give great splodges of red colour with the white church in the background. I thought the combination of bright red, white and blue might make a colourful shot. It did, and I was quite pleased with the results.
A travel photographer might not always find a perfect foreground for a photograph of a well-known building or scene - sometime there may be no foreground at all. So this is a really old and well-proven trick to bring vitality to your pictures on these occasions.
My group of snappers saw the results of this simple technique and, of course, they all wanted to try for themselves.
The top picture shows my original photograph. You really don’t need to bother about depth of field with this type of shot. Just splash the colour across your picture in the same way a painter would use a large brush. The flowers do not need to be sharp or in focus.
The centre photograph shows Ande and Cathy helping each other achieve a similar result.
The lower photograph shows Peter going solo with the same technique.
