June's Photo Challenge

Contrasts

Hello and welcome to June’s challenge.

Each month I will be sharing a new post with a different theme and a challenge for you to go out and complete, should you wish to do so. The idea is to share some of your favourite images from the challenge on the chat page of my substack. Please feel free to post your images and comment on others so that we can build a supportive community around our shared love of photography.

This month, the theme is contrasts.

Reflections of Sizewell - a contrasty black and white image.

I have recently spent a lot of time photographing Sizewell beach in Suffolk. This is a place which fascinates me because of the contrasts that can be found here. It is a beach where local fishermen still launch their boats and which is covered in flowers in the summer. It is a place full of nature and tradition but it is also overlooked by Sizewell nuclear power station (the old Magnox reactor on the left and the newer Sizewell B on the right. And soon there will be a Sizewell C on the far side.

When we talk about contrast in an image we often think about the light and the difference between the shadow areas and the highlights, as in the image above. But after making that image I went on to take another version of the same scene from further up the beach which highlights a very different contrast.

Power over nature - the contrasts of natural and man made elements.

This image uses subject and size to link the power station to the beach. The contrast is formed between nature and the man made elements and between the size of constituent components within the frame.

Images are often built around contrasts and it is these differences and the intersections where they occur that make landscape photographs interesting. There are numerous ways we can incorporate contrast into our compositions and in this post I will look at some of them.