Thinking about photographing gates

I am not sure if I have mentioned this before but over the last few years I have had this idea of doing a series of photographs over a couple of years or so featuring gates.

Now I know that initially this sounds pretty boring. Gates! Spend time photographing gates? Seriously?

It quite possibly might end up being drop-dead boring. But in my time I have seen some kind-of-interesting gates. Gates that have long been forgotten and are overgrown with weeds or other plants. Gates that go nowhere; that have no road leading up to them nor any road leading away from them. Gates that are so old that one more year of rusting will likely see them fall down in a pile of oxidised waste. Gates where the owners have put so much work into them they are more impressive than their house. Gates made by hand from anything that was available that barely, only just, function as a gate. Gates where the posts that support them have been turned into white-ant cities and you can’t see the original posts any more for the mud piled around them by the termites.

This could turn out to be a total failure but I think I will give it a go.

My initial pictures of gates will likely be pretty ho-hum. But hopefully, as I develop better techniques for photographing gates the pictures will get better—as I work out the angles, and whether to shoot them close with wide angle or away a bit with telephoto. What type of lighting brings out their characteristics the best. What to include or exclude from the backgrounds.

I can use all kinds of techniques I have learnt over the years to try and make these pictures pop. I might use triple exposure HDR, or single-shot HDR, or tone mapping, or just simple Photoshop Elements improvements, or nothing more than cropping and sharpening.

Maybe you can provide feedback and suggestions in comments? Suggest what might have worked better—or maybe even  that I should give up photographing gates because it is just too boring.

Well I have given up on the plan to get Jennifer Hawkins or Miranda Kerr to model high heels for me to photograph so I need to swing my thinking around to something else.

Here is my very first attempt. As usual clicking on the picture will load an 1,800 pixel wide image from SmugMug. Please check the larger picture on a decent screen to get the ‘real’ feel of the picture.

This picture has been heavily cropped. There are trees and power lines in the background as you can see from the uncropped image following (which is not in SmugMug).

What I like about this image:

• The bit of blue nylon ‘rope’ around the bottom of the left-hand support post, which is more noticeable in the cropped image than the uncropped image—which was a secondary reason for the cropping. That modern blue/cyan coloured nylon rope just seems so out of place on this tired old gate.
• The red rust on the gate and the chain holding it closed.
• The grey weather-worn white-ant attacked support posts (see the enlargement at right or the 1,800 wide picture in SmugMug).
• The tufts of grass struggling to stay alive at the front of the gate.

What could I have done better?

I am not too sure really. I thought about taking the picture from a lower angle but then I would not have been able to crop out the trees and the power lines in the background.

I took the angle I did because I wanted that bit of blue nylon rope on that left hand supporting post to be a ‘feature’ of the picture. Taking it from this angle puts that rope in the relative foreground and this is much more obvious when you check the large picture in SmugMug.

Please post any suggestions or thoughts that could have improved this picture as comments.