Location: Dore, Sheffield, UK

Fun with Fences

I often find myself experimenting with fence and camera. Any design of fence - wooden, chain link, barbed wire and my favourite the slated fence. A long fence presents a well defined perspective to the tools of camera & lens. A long flat repetitive surface that taper away at the far end.

With the above image, what was I trying to do?

The fence ran along a driveway to a farm. On the other side of the fence, an old elegant house and it's garden well lit by the afternoon sun.

There was a gap of about an eight inch between each fence board providing a fleeting glimpse of the other side. Even at a fairly brisk pace along the fence the brain is able to discern what it sees through each and every gap. The camera on the other hand can be made to see it differently in the image it produces. Adjusting the camera to it's slowest settings - 100 iso @ f/22 resulted in a shutter speed of about two-thirds of a second. At that speed you can see the compilation of slat views snapshots realise itself as one image. You can see to the left the garden begins to emerge from behind the fence. Conceivably I could make the entire garden appear in front of the fence while not being able to see more than a tiny fraction of it at any time. The zoetrope effect at work. 

A fence is just a fence, a wall just a wall. Unless you have a camera with manual settings.

 More fence fun - a fence piece video I shot in a parking lot with a slightly different spin on it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/47289195@N08/4477950197