Meet Sandy Pollock: Patch's Summer Photo Contest Winner

ST. LOUIS, MO — Sandy Pollock was born in England, moved to Australia when she was 20, moved back to England, then met a Scotsman in Paris who lived in St. Louis. She married him, moved with him to his adopted city, and has lived here ever since, she told Patch.

It's fitting then that Pollock is the winner of Patch's first summer photo contest, showing that sometimes to really get to know a city, you have to have a little perspective first.

(Enter Patch's fall photo contest for your chance to be featured next.)

Pollock said she took up photography after she had her son —"For several years, we did our best to keep Kodak in business" — but soon the camera was relegated to the cupboard, only taken out for annual vacations.

Then, about 14 years ago, a friend commented on one of Pollock's photos, telling her she had a good eye for composition.

"Composition?" Pollock asked. "With no art background at all, I had no idea what she was talking about, but since she worked for a magazine in the art department, I remembered what she said and began to occasionally take the camera out of its prison."

Pollock joined the St. Louis Camera Club in 2012 and began taking classes on photography, saying that Photoshop "nearly caused me to shoot myself, but I persevered..."

"There was so much to learn," she said. "Landscapes, nature, photojournalism, travel and just 'anything goes' — [I] tried them all."

Pollock soon discovered a love for street photography — candid photos of people in public places — and began shooting cyclists at Creve Coeur Lake, always trying to improve her composition skills. "My first love is street," she said, adding that it's also made her more interested in architecture — "all those leading lines and patterns and geometry really draw my eye."

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Pollock said she was inspired byValerie Jardin, a French street photographer who lives in the U.S., saying she was attracted to Jardin's "excellent composition."

"Her work was one of the main reason s I was attracted to street photography," Pollock said. "Even though I was raised in the English countryside, I take after my maternal grandmother who loved cities, so I am always happy in a city anywhere as long as it's a big one with lots of people."

Pollock also cited Portuguese photographer Rui Palha and his use of leading lines as a big inspiration to her own photography.

She said St. Louis can often be "lean pickings" for street photography — she prefers more-crowded Chicago — but the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Saint Louis Zoo do offer good places to shoot, you just have to be inventive.

When she first started, Pollock used a Canon Rebel — one of the company's entry level DSLRs, then transitioned to a Canon 6D, a full-frame "prosumer" camera. But last year, she bought a smaller Fujifilm X-T2. "I love this camera," she said. "Light, weatherproof, don't have to go through menus to change settings, fast and sharp and no need for a tripod."

Like many street photographers, she favors a compact camera that is light and easy to carry around — keys to making sure your camera always goes out the door with you.

But it's not the camera that makes a good photo, she says. Emotion and composition are the keys to spellbinding still frames.

The photo than won Pollock the contest was a wonderfully moody shot of a man walking his dog through the fog one morning in Kirkwood Park (it's the third photo at the top of the page).

We loved the misty light captured in her image, as well as the framing. Pollock keeps the horizon low in the frame, accentuating the height of the trees, and places her subject (the man and his dog) just off center, near the right third of the frame.

The path also makes a gently curving leading line, drawing the eye further into the photograph's misty background. And, if you look closely, there appears to be a subtle halo around the man, maybe created by a drop of condensation on the lens. We don't know if that was intentional or not, but it's pretty cool.

"[I] have always loved fog," Pollock said, "and we don't get much of it in St. Louis. Or, if we do, it always seems far off with quite a length of visibility. Before the days of clean air, industrial cities used to have pea soup fog — really thick and atmospheric.

"That morning, I got up and looked out the window and saw this thick, wonderful fog. Was out of the house in 10 minutes with my camera. Raced down to Kirkwood Park, looking for people with their pets. It was deserted. Wandered around for around half an hour and saw a man jogging, but he was far off and the fog swallowed him. No one else came along.

"Eventually, [I] went downtown to Kirkwood and shot a few people there, but that was not what I was after. Ultimately, decided to give up and go home, but passing the park on the way, my car just turned in. So, I got out, walked to a spot I'd picked out and waited. Not long. This man walked by and I fast-walked after him until he and I were both where I'd hoped we'd be, and I took one shot before he was semi-swallowed up by the fog."

All photos by Sandy Pollock (used with permission)