Sarah's Blip

So today's blip is somewhat different in that I didn't take the photo.

I was delivering a washing machine to a car park in Leeds where I met my brother in law to pass it on, when I got a text from a friend asking if I'd take her youngest daughter Sarah onto the moor to take a photo in the fashion of Amsel Adams. I replied yes then spent the journey home knowing that I'd was about to be found out as a fraud and fearful of the trust and belief young people can have in you which is ill founded, then wondering how on earth I'd match my brief. I met Sarah and her mum by the Cow and Calf in flat afternoon light, mum then said bye and offered tea to me in payment.

I talked a bit about composition and histograms -and what Amsels' histograms would have looked like and just before Sarah fell over horizontal and comatose with the sheer boredom of it all we got some sun, the right kind of sun that made things all extremes of light and dark, the shadows all broody and intense and made the rocks all solid and mega and monolithic and what had seemed like a cardboard cut out had become 3 even 4 dimensional and I said look at that light on the rock then she took some photos and within 3-4 shots she had got it and in the 20mins of good light she had some great shots in the can.

We came back to my computer and chose one each which we did a wee bit of processing on and I learned loads by showing her, and she I think learned something too. So here's Sarah's favourite - not cropped (all mine end up cropped) and some fiddling with the highlights and shadows and then all mono'ed. She said I could blip it and so I will. By Christmas she'll know more than I'll ever know, and when she's famous and people want lessons in taking photos in the fashion of Sarah and her prints are being bought up by Getty - I'll have this blip to say I was there when....