Poster People

Last week seemed a strange week – the temperatures suggested Spring but the countryside was disinclined to acknowledge that Spring might have arrived [see my comments in last Friday’s post, ‘In the Spirit of Optimism’].

Bereft of nature’s colours I had a productive hour or two photographing sites around Milton Keynes that I had mentally noted in the past as worth a visit. And the plan is to post images from those sites  over the course of the next week or two – unless Nature dictates otherwise.

The image to the Left is of a sculpture called ‘Chain Reaction’ by Ray Smith sited in Campbell Park close to MK’s main shopping centre. It’s a dramatic sculpture that I really like and worth an image in its own right (although I could do better than this shot), but it was the interplay of the sculpture with another feature of Campbell Park that had caught my eye. Click to enlarge either small image.

Projecting out into the slope of Campbell Park is a Promontory of land – a popular viewing point – and there is the potential for combining the sculpture and people on the promontory within one shot.

Except for the stupidity of the planners who allowed a lamp post to be sited in exactly the wrong position to defeat this objective, as you can see on the Right. Clever!

But, I’m not easily put off and I found an alternative POV that meant I could still include the sculpture and the promontory’s visitors although not in quite the way I had first thought of.

For this final image, I chose to de-saturate and also posterize it to reduce the image to the bare essentials.

Click to enlarge

Capturing a really good image of this sculpture is a work in progress for me, and I plan to re-visit during the year to see how I can improve on what I already have.