To be successful at something, you have two options open to you. One is to be cute / handsome / beautiful / photogenic and have a good agent, in which case you'll be endorsing products you never use faster than you can say "here today, gone tomorrow". For most people, though, the way to be good at something is to do it a lot and be ready to screw up a lot.

While we currently live in a culture which regards failure as the eighth deadly sin, great teachers past and present remind us that you won't succeed if you don't fail a lot first. The great Tai Chi master Cheng Man Ching used the phrase "invest in loss".  Numerous people have said that failure is one step on the way to success, and while that sounds like a bad line from a motivational speaker, there's more than a little truth to it. Henri Cartier-Bresson is reported to have said that "your first ten thousand photographs are your worst", and if I take that literally then everything I've posted on my blog thus far is crap :-)

Thus you have to try new things. When it comes to photography, I'm entirely self-taught. I have no artistic training, and I was rubbish at art at school. It's therefore something of a mystery to me why I'm so attracted to photography, but I'm not going to knock it. So I figure that I should learn more about the why and wherefore of making images.

I was reading up on how and why Cartier-Bresson's images are so powerful, and I thought to myself "I have to go out and try that". To anyone with artistic training, most of these things will be obvious, but to me they were pretty interesting. Cartier-Bresson shot almost exclusively in black and white.  I usually shoot RAW, and if not that then JPEG fine, so the original file is always in colour, but if the colour's not that interesting then I always play around with the file in Lightroom and/or Photoshop to see what I can get from a black and white conversion. Sometimes it's a minor improvement, and at other times a huge one.

By the way, this is in no way an attempt to insinuate that i'm trying to copy him; you can't. It's like trying to cover "Bohemian Rhapsody" while trying to be taken seriously. I just read up on some of the compositional and artistic concepts that are often attributed to him and tried to use them.

Anyway. Here are some (mainly black and white) experiments.

One of the things I was reading about is the idea of making your subject stand out by putting a dark figure on a light background or vice versa. When I saw this man using the water fountain at my local park, it seemed like a good example of this.

Another thing that Cartier-Bresson talked about was "geometry", and he used lines and shapes a lot in his photos. I don't know what this man was doing, but he was carrying a long stick around. I wanted to get the picture with his stick at the same angle as the trees, but my timing was off. Still, it struck me as an interesting image.

Another case of dark figure on light surface. The original looked ok, but it seemed far more striking to me when I converted it to b/w

Can't remember exactly what I was going for here, but the man's expression and hand gestures make the shot. I don't know if he was gesturing at me or not; I was quite a long way away and shooting at 200mm. 

Not easy to see unless you zoom right in, but the light caught this man beautifully, especially on his head. In the original, he was wearing a yellow t-shirt, but once again the conversion to B/W looks better to my eyes. Again, it's a light subject on a (relatively) dark background, and I shot it wide open to keep the attention on the subject.

This one works better in colour. I tried various B/W conversions, but nothing looked as good as the original colour with some tweaks to contrast and saturation.

I originally shot this because the light was interesting, but looking at it now I see that it's all vertical lines.

This lady was taking pictures of the fountain. Because she was sitting on her heels, it gave a nice impression of scale (the fountain seemed to dwarf her). I shot this one, and then....

...I got lucky. The wind blew the fountain spray all over her. Given that it was pushing 36 degrees today, she probably appreciated it.

Lastly, another "photo of a photographer". Trying to give a "vertical" impression with the man, the water and the trees in the background.

Thanks for looking!