Lesson 1

[Anonymous]

Sorry this wasn’t a little more creative. I realized today how badly I need to clean my house so used what I could inside…and used my back up camera (battery was drained in the other) so the quality isn’t as good. I just wanted to get it started today, I’ve already learned a lot though! Thanks.

[Duncan Rawlinson]

Great work on your first assignment!

For this assignment our primary concern was allowing you to focus on a few design elements which would hopefully come naturally to you. At this point it’s not important to understand the technical elements to make a great photograph. Instead we wanted you to re-frame a photograph (from beast to beauty) using no more than your emotions or “gut feelings”.

At this point however, we’ll start to deconstruct these compositions to find out which design elements stimulated those gut feelings.

Three of the most obvious design elements that jump off the page at me are:

1. Color palette simplicity
2. Edges clean of amputation (cutting off of objects with 1 or more of the 4 walls of your photograph)
3. Focus on one idea

1. Color palette simplicity
In your “beauty” photograph, you’ve further limited your color palette by using primarily only gradients of blue and orange with a red “highlight” (many photographers call this a color “pop”). These are very dramatic complimentary colors (you’ll learn about color theory in an upcoming lecture), but as a general rule of thumb complimentary colors are much more dramatic than analogous colors.

2. Edges clean of amputation
In your “beast” image you have small objects on the right and left side of the frame which clutter your composition. Your “beauty” photograph also cleans up all 4 walls of your photograph.

3. Focus on one idea
Lastly, you’ve managed to focus in on 1 idea in your “beauty” photograph. Your “beast” photograph contains many different elements. The television and the painting both play a prominent role so your visual story becomes unclear. Where should we focus? What is the relationship between the objects? However, you’ve corrected this in your “beauty” photograph by picking only 1 message and you’ve worked to make that as clear as possible.

Overall great work! I look forward to seeing your next assignments.

[Anonymous]

Thank you! 🙂

[Duncan Rawlinson]

😀

[Author]

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