Inspired #18

Working with textural contrasts

Hello and welcome to Inspired, a weekly email for my paid subscribers. In this series I want to explore topics which I hope might spark some inspiration for your own photography. I will talk about my thought process for creating images, both in the field and in post processing. The posts will be linked in some way to the monthly challenges, hopefully giving you all lots of food for thought.

This month the photo challenge is all about contrast and in this weeks inspired post I wanted to discuss working with contrasts in textures.

Texture is one of my favourite aspects of photography and I love working with the transition zones where different textures meet. These can be small differences in abstract images or much larger areas of contrast in landscape scenes.

Textural contrasts make subjects stand out. They can occur naturally or they can be created by changing the look of what is already there. For example by using slow shutter speeds to freeze motion in elements such as water or clouds or by using a selective focus to blur foreground or background textures.

In this post I am going to look at how we can work with some of these elements to create interesting images.