What does it mean to be a photographer?

Ok... so I take part in a weekly photo challenge (or at least try to), I think it's a great idea and it is organised by a friend of mine. The thought behind the whole thing is that it will bring people together who share a similar interest. It also helps those amateur photographers, like me, get some inspiration and actually have a reason to get out there and take some photos! 

I've been really slacking recently, and hadn't entered for a while. Last weeks challenge was a simple one entitled 'Pink'. I had a subject in mind, a passion flower that is in my garden, and planned to take the shot at the weekend. However, snow fell, and made everything white! I stood staring out of my window desperately trying to think of a new subject, when I spotted a lone pink clothes peg on the washing line! 

I didn't really know how I could make this an interesting show, so decided to take a close look. As I approached I noticed a water droplet clinging to the end of the peg, and reached for my Macro lens. The resulting shot...

I must admit, I wasn't overly pleased with the shot this was the best of a few that I took. It's too dark for my liking, but I had somewhere to be and quickly submitted the entry! 

This brings me to the title of this post, the current challenge is 'What does it mean to be a photographer?'. You may recall me saying in my first post that I am not arty, or creative, and therefore I almost instantly dismissed this challenge...

It was a few days later, whilst driving down the A46 near Coventry, that I started to think about the challenge in a different light. I thought about what I enjoy taking photographs of, and what made me blow my wages on lenses and DSLR's. This led me to my passion of taking photographs of wild birds, or wildlife in general, and decided I could perhaps theme my shot around this. 

Today, whilst driving home from work, intent on getting a shot for the challenge, I actually had a little bit of a creative spark in my head! Well, I think so anyway... I decided that, overall, photography is about capturing an instance of time, and immortalising it in an image. Which led me to submitting the following shot...

Get it...? A watch...? Time...? Well, I thought it was a good idea anyway! One of my ulterior motives for taking this picture was that I wanted to try something called 'Focus Stacking'. This is something I came across whilst talking to a friend of mine about lunar photography. Whilst reading in to it I learned that it is extremely useful for still life macro photography as well, expanding the depth of field significantly.

Overall, I'm happy with the shot, although there are some areas where the software I used to stack the images has completely lost the detail. However, you have to be viewing at 100% for it to be too obvious in my opinion...

I might write a post about focus stacking at a later date when I find a more interesting subject, although the software I used is called Helicon Focus, which has some pretty good video tutorials built in!