One of the pieces of advice often given to photographers is to not have too much in your pictures. The more elements you have in a picture, the more potential pitfalls there are. It's a bit like juggling; the more items you juggle, the more potential reward but also the more potential disaster. 

With pictures, however, a shot with only a few elements can, if done right, be quite attractive. So this is a selection of shots with relatively few elements.

This idea started a while ago when I took this shot.

I don't know why I like it: the "orangey/yellow thing" (not even sure what it is) is sort of around a rule of thirds point and its colour is different enough to really stand out from the ground, but I don't know if those reasons explain it. I just quite like it.

So I've been aiming to shoot in a similar way, as well as digging up a few such shots from my collection. In keeping with the minimalist theme, I will try to use as few words as needed. These were shot with a mix of cameras: the newer stuff is the Olympus OMD-EM5 and the constantly impressive 75mm 1.8, plus one with the Leica M8 and one or two with the D3S.

(As an aside, and just to contradict myself by using more words, I've started shooting JPEG (highest quality) with the Olympus because it produces very nice JPEGs. With the Sigma I had to shoot RAW to get the best out of it, and the M8 is hardly known as a JPEG camera, to put it mildly. The D3S could do both, and the Olympus is similar. Most of the Olympus shots here are JPEGs with hardly any adjustment).

Anyway, on with the shots.

I think the fact that the bird is facing to (its) left and not facing me is what makes this one interesting.

The sky is an obvious choice when going for a minimalist shot. For some reason I was looking up at the sky today and noticed that there seemed to be a fair number of planes in the sky. Planes leave trails. Trails are lines. So I had a go at a few pictures with that in mind.

I was aiming for this kind of composition, but it was only afterwards that I realised that the plane's trail was on a similar diagonal to the branch. Nice bit of luck.

I was trying to get this one to be a perfect diagonal across the frame, but my timing (or possibly patience) was off. Still, looks interesting enough to me.

Moving away from the sky for a few more: this one is not unlike the first one in the set, but this time it's some kind of grasshopper.

My take on "Six persimmons": "Two oranges" :-)

Keeping in with the theme of minimalism, I should theoretically sign off with "KTHXBYE", but I can't bring myself to. So I'll go with the normal "thanks for looking!"