Re: Re: First assignment

#18920
Duncan Rawlinson
Keymaster

Great assignment.

What you’ve decided to do with this assignment is tighten your framing making the background less of a distracting element which also pulls more audience attention to your main area of interest. Subsequently, macro photography focuses less on “place” on more on shapes, lines, lighting and pattern. In your second photograph you’ve exposed the shot in such a way that the background becomes black and lacks all detail. You’ve taken your exposure reading from the lighter areas in the frame and therefore underexposed your background which provides the look of a nice blank, black canvas.

Image simplification is one of the easiest ways, and arguably one of the most important ways to draw your viewers attention into your photograph and tell them a story. However, what I want to you to realize is that although you were initially drawn towards macro photography to make this happen, that doesn’t always need to be the case.

In film, independent filmmakers often choose to frame close ups of shots because composing and lighting large scenes are more complex and expensive. The same is often true for photography as well which is why many photographers are drawn towards tight frame or macro photography. However, as you’ll learn in subsequence lessons, the idea of simplification can still be found in more complicated photographs. You can do this by being careful not to amputate (cut off) objects with one of the 4 walls of your photograph, lighting your object properly with studio or natural lighting and using aperture and shutter speed control to manipulate exposure and depth.

So you’re on the right track with the idea of simplification, but my point is to try to experiment more with the idea of finding creative ways to organize chaos rather than just removing the chaos completely and moving in close to your subjects. You’ll learn about this in your next assignments. Great first assignment!