My World

You'd think that landscapes and portraiture would be enough to photograph, but the world is much more diverse than these narrow avenues of photography. If you know the Magnum agency's work well, you'll have heard of Elliott Erwitt. He is perhaps famous for his images of dogs.

I personally love dogs and I find his images very entertaining. He has a knack of capturing the personalities of dogs and often photographs them with their owners... to the degree that you're not sure just who is who and what is what.

So it was with delight this week when one of my participants on my Harris workshop - Mike, told me he has published his own book. I initially thought it was a book of landscape photography, but not so. I enclose an image of the front cover:

Mike tells me that he ghost-wrote this book with Patsy (the dog on the front cover). Patsy's full name is Patricia Woofings, Earl of Blanchland.

I had a good look at it on Blurb and think it's terrific. Humorous, because quite frankly, Patsy is a dog in control of her life and clearly has her 'owner' under her thumb.

On a serious note, I think it's terrific when people create projects such as this. I know Mike got a lot of fun out of doing it, but he also had something to work on, to give his photography some direction. I often find that participants on my workshops don't know if they have a style, because their images are just collected onto a hard drive and never go any further. Creating a project gives you a goal and a purpose for going out shooting.

Patsy's book is available on Blurb.