This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge is hosted by Amy.  Her chosen theme is “less is more“.  Amy’s inspiration for this theme is a quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” 

Now that is a very intriguing notion to me, because it seems to me that there is nothing more perfect than nature’s design.  As someone who takes nature photos, the question I often ask myself is — “to what extent can we alter nature’s design (and our photos) without losing everything?”

Tinder dry

droplet

Another quote used by Amy was this one from John Maeda.

“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.”

I think I need your help on this one, ladies and gentlemen.  Does Maeda’s quote imply that simplicity is synonymous with meaningful?  If so, let me ask you a simple question.

Why are we here?

Perhaps the answer is neither obvious nor simple?  Without context (complexity), can we agree on what is meaningful?

sap.jpg
swan (1)

And in this context, how much detail is too much detail?

Peekaboo

Do these question do your head in?  Good, join the club.  🙂

Only the first two photos in this series were taken by me.  The rest were taken by my family.  They are completely unedited, except for the last one which I may have brightened up a little (it was so long ago that I can’t remember).

Kind Regards.
Tracy.

 

 

 

 

21 thoughts on “Lens-Artists Challenge – Less Is More”

  3. Good questions, Tracy. As I mentioned in my post I haven’t been able to achieve “when there is nothing left to take away” and … This concept helped me on focusing the subject with minimum distractions.
    Great selections for this theme. Thank you so much for joining in L-A PC.

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    1. Thank you for dropping by, Amy. I really enjoyed this challenge. I tried to cut back to the when-there-is-nothing-left-to-take-away point too, but I surrendered to my urge for more. My photos are good not enough for very fine detail. Maybe one day. 😉

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    1. Thank you, Ann-Christine. My son, who took the photo, was thrilled by your comment. Your photos were great too. The wind-tower juxtaposed with the bench seat (bus stop?) really appealed to me. I could just not imagine such a bucolic scene with a coal-fired power station.

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      1. Haha, no…my thoughts of those wind-towers are wavering between their doing good and their disturbing the views …But in this shot I like it. Glad you do as well!

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  7. I think it always depends of the point of view and what the context is. If you can’t even guess what’s depicted, what sense does the picture have? Or is its message that there’s none? Aargh! These kind of questions drive me crazy! 😂
    By the way – your beautiful photos always take a lot of time for me to load down and open and I’m not sure if it’s me or you. What size do your jpegs usually have? Because you know, sometimes less is more. 😉

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    1. Thanks for the feedback, Sarah. The photos I haven’t edited are usually pretty large. They can be up to 10mb. Ones I’ve cropped tend to be much smaller. I wonder if I can shrink them (not sure of the technical term) without affecting the picture quality. I’ll check with my IT gurus on this one.

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      1. Ah, that makes sense. Yes, you can shrink your images without affecting the picture quality too much. My pictures are usually somewhere between 800 kb up to 1 MB. That’s totally sufficient for sharing on your social media channels since most people use laptops, ipads or their phones. I’m sure your boys can help you with this, once explained it’s pretty simple. 😊

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