Creating the Visually Unexpected

One of the things I like about photography is that you can take a picture of something very mundane and achieve a completely unexpected result. Here I was being perhaps a little silly trying out my new camera and wondering how it would cope with the variation in contrast between the street and the rubbish that can be seen through the two broken glass bricks. To answer that question, I was actually very pleased with the result and I was also very pleased about how the rubbish was blurred so that it’s recognisable but not sharp.

For me however there are a number of surprising things about this photograph. The first is how much detail the camera has captured in the floor. The textures and tones have come out superbly and are quite appealing. Most surprising however is where my shoes ended up in the shot. The camera appears to have decided to rotate the image through 90 degrees so that my shoes are along the edge rather than the bottom.

Now you may not think this is very exciting however it’s something I could only have done in post processing had I tried to do this deliberately. It’s also something that would never have crossed my mind to try. The result however is much more dynamic and pleasing than the version with my feet along the bottom. The moral of this story then is don’t just accept what you see in the frame. Experiment and look to find ways to create the visually unexpected.