Ugly???

A friend said to me recently that I made Orkney look too pretty and that I should take some pictures of ugly things. I set out today to do just that and it proved very difficult indeed.

What is ugly? My friend when I asked what she meant, she said 'Well, bruck on the beach and stuff like that!" (translation for those not in the Northern Isles - rubbish on the beach) I did this, it looked too pretty. Nice bits of turquoise fishing net against stone, great colour contrast etc.

After some thought I reckoned that the only really ugly things here are man made. So headed for the harbours and ferry points. They proved to have an industrial beauty and will become a blip subject in the future. We do have some mind numbingly bland, grey kit houses here, but even they looked pretty photogenic given the right composition and setting.

I found this really hard to do. I find once I look at something I tend to see the beauty in things that can be looked on as ugly. And looking around blip most people seem to be able to do the same. I think no matter what it is you can view it in a way that brings out the best.

Maybe I'm not good at taking gritty, thought provoking, images hard images that show a dark side. But then, even those are beautiful. Who could argue that Kamran's image of Maik that has caused so much discussion yesterday is an image of the ugly side of life. But it's not an ugly photograph by any means, far from it. Maybe I should work on harder, darker images. Maybe they just dont happen in my life and as first and foremost this is a journal to me, should i create things that don't happen just to prove to myself that I could do it if I wanted to? DO I want to???

I don't think I've risen to the challenge but I eventually settled on this image of a building under repair after a fire. I came around the corner and it smacked me in the eye. It's not a beautiful structure, it's not even intended to please the eye but the colours work and after a bit of cropping the graphic quality of the shapes appealed to me.

Should I take pictures of things to make them look ugly? I could take a badly composed picture of a subject with no interest, not texture, no colour - or no lack of it in the case of the recent mist pictures, and no story. But what would be the point of that?

I may try this again but I'm not sure if I can or want to crack it. This has confused me.

EDIT~

Meant to say, had a bit of a drama during the night!