Haiku Photography

In conversations over the course of the Fringe I shared with Christina of Seth and Christina. She liked the way I had captured what was happening on the High Street. I told her that many years ago I fell in love will the Haiku poetry.

The beauty I’ve always found in the form is how in such a few words an entire picture can be conveyed.

Poetry in terms of the classics like Wordsworth and Marvell are great, but they in their wording describe the whole visual image. They’ll tell you the colour of the sky, the colour of the grass. They could be described as wide angle poets.

Haiku poets like Basho and Issa were telephoto poets. Their words describing a scene thru just a portion of the overall picture.

Old Pond,
Leap, splash,
A frog!

Basho.

Reflected,
In a dragonflies eye,
Mountains.

Issa.

My photography is in the most part inspired by that Haiku tradition. You will find a reasonable number of wide angle photographs in the pages of work throughout my blog empire. But the majority of photographs are telephoto or at times extreme telephoto. Where the overall image is reduced to just a small part of the overall picture. Where it is for the person viewing the image to use their imagination and own creativity to fully appreciate the whole scene that is displayed before them.
Images reduced to a fraction of the overall picture. Last year I photographed two performers. They thought they were getting a full length portrait what they got was one of my favourite shots from last year.
If I could have used even longer lenses this year I would have had more opportunity to play around. What I could do to recreate the idea is crop images already in use down to just portions and it would be like a game for anyone arriving; you could try to figure out where they come from!