Photography Classes Online – Icon Photography School › Forums › Photography Lessons › Lesson 6 › Selling bananas
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Duncan Rawlinson.
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March 14, 2010 at 9:04 pm #18122
Mary
ParticipantSelling bananas in Ghana.
March 17, 2010 at 8:26 am #19569Duncan Rawlinson
KeymasterGreat work with this assignment!
This is, without question, your strongest composition yet. Not only is it your most precisely designed composition, but it’s also the most dramatic and interesting story out of the photos you’ve submitted so far. I’m thrilled to see you being out in environments taking photographs of people in your surroundings.
Let’s begin by taking a closer look at this photograph. For starters, color plays a primary role in the design of this composition. The dramatic and highly saturated yellows and oranges help make this photograph “pop” out at your audience and help create a very friendly and warm tone.
Using the wall as your background was a great idea because it helps you use negative space to help you isolate your viewer’s attention to the action in the middle of the frame. But it also does more than that. Negative space can be a double edged sword. Negative space can also over-simplify the composition making it appear flat or boring (this can be especially true when you shoot something against a white wall). However, your background is full of texture and the gradients of the colors bleed into one another making the background and dynamic and interesting object in an of itself. It’s not simply “dead space” that is meant to help create a void, but instead a beautiful complementary highlight giving your audience something interesting to explore when they are not exploring the rest of your image.
On a similar note, the color of the background also helps create the overall mood and tone of the image. It also ties in nicely with the primary object (the bananas). It’s a beautiful photographic opportunity where the design elements just spontaneously existed in this natural environment. Great eye.
I also really appreciate the framing of the family. The man standing behind the young child is positioned in such a way that his legs help create a sort of a “frame within a frame” helping further isolate and draw interest to the child with the bananas. Again, another rare moment caught at the exact right time!
The sense of lines embedded in this photograph are also great. The road at the bottom of the composition breaks up the background and allows for the inclusion of a small foreground. Similarly, the lines created by the body language of all of the subject’s are drawing the audience’s attention down towards the bananas.
Overall, great work on this photograph!
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