Lesson 1 – beast to beauty

[Serrière]

Hi,
here it is, the beast, bland boring looking chair, and the beauty…my daughter’s hand on the chair…
Looking forward to your comments and the next few weeks!
Thanks[attachment=1:1e1fst33]IMG_2677.jpg[/attachment:1e1fst33][attachment=0:1e1fst33]IMG_2671.jpg[/attachment:1e1fst33]

[Duncan Rawlinson]

Hi there,

Thanks for posting your first batch of images. My apologies for the delay in posting a critique on this one. It’s been a crazy few days for me…

Nonetheless. Let’s into it. I can tell immediately that you are ready to learn.

Now these images do meet the criteria in that your beast photo certainly isn’t as good as your beauty shot.

Although adding the hand was a little bit of a cheat 😉

The first thing I should say is this. Your photo has baggage. What I mean is that this photo is meaningful to you and beautiful to you in a way that nobody else could understand (assuming this is the hand of your child). To me it’s just a kids hand. This is a big distinction. If you want your photos to be meaningful to other people you have to remove your baggage from them. Meaning, just because you know who this hand belongs to doesn’t mean that it will mean anything to a total stranger.

Every person will have a unique perspective when they see your photos. You can’t assume they will know what you know.

This is the reason why editors exist. Often, the people who shoot the photos or make the films are so emotionally involved that they cannot separate themselves from the images they create. An editor can come in and say yes, no, yes… They can pick what works and what doesn’t because they don’t care about the baggage. They don’t care how hard it was the get the shot etc.

One thing you can do to overcome this is to shoot photos and then look at them a week or two later. Hopefully at that point you will only see the photo for what it is and you’ll have less baggage…

On another note the photo is very yellow and this is because the white balance is incorrect. You will learn more about this late but what happened here is that your camera thought it was shooting a photo in daylight when it was really shooting under incandescent light. As a result the photos are very yellow.

I suggest you take a look at the white balance setting on your camera and match the icon to the shooting environment you’re in. If it’s a sunny day use the icon that looks like the sun, if you’re in an office building with fluorescent light use the fluorescent light icon…

Thanks for signing up for the course and I will see you on assignment 2.

Don’t forget to follow on Twitter!

[Serrière]

thank you for your feedback. I agree it was cheating 😉 , although I used your suggestion of putting something extra in the pic. I guess I really struggled to make this chair interesting apart from showing the grain of the wood up close with a ‘living thing’ on it. Thanks for the tip on balance. Will get on to lesson 2.
Thanks!

[Duncan Rawlinson]

Awesome!

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