Assignment 1: Beauty vs. Beast

[Katie]

Thanks for the feedback. This is my first photography class… I love taking photos, but I hardly know how to use the functions on my camera. Any advice is greately appreciated!

Beast:
[attachment=1:1yy6fvju]Cat card and toy 1.JPG[/attachment:1yy6fvju]

Beauty:
[attachment=0:1yy6fvju]cat card and toy 2.JPG[/attachment:1yy6fvju]

[Duncan Rawlinson]

Wonderful first assignment. You’ve taken a photograph of a postcard with a cat and complimented it with the cat’s toy.

I found it surprised by your “beast” photograph, because I didn’t find it very beast like. It was well composed, free from distracting unnecessary objects, it had no amputation around the 4 walls of the photograph and you had a limited and simply color palette. Virtually all of the same elements existed in both photographs.

By moving in closer you’ve removed the table and well from the composition and you’ve highlighted the lighting component of the image. But in doing so you’ve also removed the dark black tone which means now we’re left with a gradient of mid tones. This isn’t technically wrong, but as you’ll soon learn in your lecture on black and white photography, you want to try to achieve the widest possible tonal range as possible. This means avoiding clumping your tones in the middle of the spectrum (grays).

By moving in closer, you’ve also pulled out the texture of the toy. Because the post card is 2 dimensional, there was no extra texture to be brought out there. I’m also not sure of the interaction between the cat’s face and the foreground toy. I like how the toy frames one of the cats eyes but I don’t like how the right frame of the photograph cuts off the cat’s other eye. This looks unintentional to me. I think you need to decide to either include the entire eye, or remove the entire eye. Otherwise framing like this could look unmotivated and therefore accidental.

Other than that, I think you’re off to a good start.

But before you move onto the next lesson please take the time to watch the following 2 lighting tutorials. Although they are directed at filmmakers, the ideas discussed are exactly the same for photographers.

Lighting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6JFVHRwJwc&feature=channel_page

Color temperature introduction
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwqNRqDx680&feature=channel_page

Overall, great first assignment.

[Author]

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