Re: Re: Lesson 1 (Beauty&Beast)

#19898
Duncan Rawlinson
Keymaster

Hello Heaven!!

Welcome to the student forum!! Thanks for submitting your first assignment.

Lesson number one reads as follows:

Lesson 1: Assignment Assignment
Title: Beast to Beauty

We want you to find something particularly boring in your home. It could be a doorknob, a remote control, a garbage can, a plain couch, tiles or anything else which you would rarely notice around your home.
Something totally forgettable and uninteresting.

Now what we want you to do is to take 2 pictures of the object. Take one picture of it as you normally see it. Stand back and take the picture of the object with disregard for its relation to other things or any interesting elements within the object itself.

Now, I want you to get close to the object and see it with fresh eyes. How can you make this object interesting? What if you changed the lighting? What if you added something to it? What if you zoomed in? What if you blurred your camera to make it more abstract? What if you put it in close relation to something else to make it more interesting? These are all just ideas, but the possibilities are endless. Now Take a second picture and turn this ordinary object into something much more visually pleasing.

For your first assignment my first reaction was that you’ve done quite well!

A wall clock is just about as mundane of an object as you can get so job well done on finding something boring!

Now your ‘after’ or ‘beauty’ shot is quite revealing. Look at how much more interesting that photograph is?! This isn’t a clock it’s a WEATHER STATION!

When you get closer to your subjects in photography you naturally reveal more and more detail. In fact thats one of the reasons people love what’s known as macro photography, you see more and more detail the closer you get.

In fact here are a couple of macro photos that I took recently:


Let Me Go! by thelastminute, on Flickr


Electric Flyswatter Zaps A Fly by thelastminute, on Flickr

Just consider how much more interesting those photographs are than just a photo of a fly from far away.

So always try to get close.

It’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned in my photography over the years.

If I can teach people one thing about getting better photos it’s just that, get closer than you think seems natural.

Of course sometimes this is not always possible but you get the idea.

Again, welcome to the forum and I look forward to your next submissions.

Thanks!