Assignment 1 – Re-Discovering your world

Photography Classes Online – Icon Photography School Forums Photography Lessons Lesson 1 Assignment 1 – Re-Discovering your world

Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #17682
    charitymiles
    Participant

    I took something I overlook everyday and tried to express the history, beauty and richness of this piano.

    This is what it looks like normally:

    [attachment=1:37sv1otg]Assign 11.jpg[/attachment:37sv1otg]

    And this is my new perspective:

    [attachment=0:37sv1otg]Assign 12.jpg[/attachment:37sv1otg]

    #19104
    Duncan Rawlinson
    Keymaster

    Great assignment.

    I’m glad you mentioned that you wanted to “express the history, beauty and richness” of the piano.

    Your approached this photograph with an urge to tell a story, no matter how subtle. As a photographer you don’t’ use words to tell your story, you instead use the illusion of 3 dimensions and the objects that make it within your 4 walls.

    However, simply taking photographs of objects isn’t enough to tell a story. Sure, you get the idea across, but you’ll do so with very little poetry if you don’t understand the finer points of this craft. Just as a writer can create a story in point-form to communicate a point, it’s through the use of punctuation, the proper placement of words and a clear voice, that the words come alive. The same is true for photography. You want to try and stay away from the visual point-form. You want to go deeper into each object, explore it and then expose it through photography with an attention to the fine details of the object.

    You first photograph is great because it represents what not to do. It’s a “point-form” type of photograph. It says “I’m a piano”, but beyond that it says very little.

    Your second photograph gets in closer to explore the character of the object. You’ve helped tell your story by highlighting texture, using depth and getting close enough to expose some blemishes on the piano. Your idea was to express richness, history and beauty, and I think this photograph does a wonderful job of that.

    Very quickly, I want to outline some compositional mistakes in your “beast” photograph. Most importantly, your 4 walls of the photograph are poorly composed. You’ve amputated (i.e. cut off), virtually every secondary object in your photograph. The top wall is cutting off candles and frames, the bottom wall is cutting of boxes other random object. This is likely the most common mistake that photographs make.

    Please be careful in future assignments, to pay as much attention to your 4 walls as you do the center of your photograph. It’s important to amputate strategically or decide what to leave in and take out.

    Great work!

Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.