Lesson 1: Re-discovering your World

[Gary]

Beast to beauty

[Duncan Rawlinson]

Great work!

You’ve essentially made 3 major changes to this photograph.

1: You’ve limited your color palette
2: You’ve removed non-essential objects
3: You’ve strategically used lighting to help direct your viewer’s attention

The color palette in your “beast” image isn’t completely disorganized, however, your “beauty” image does further limited the palette which helps you simplify the composition.

More importantly, is your removal of non-essential elements. It seems to me you asked yourself “what is this visual story about”. When you answered the question objects such as the post, the road and the bricks in the background didn’t make it into your answer.

You’ve successfully changed your story from a “picture of the backyard” to a ‘picture of an angle”.

Most importantly, you’ve used lighting to draw your audience’s attention to your main area of interest. Audiences are often drawn towards the lightest area of a composition so it’s important that you think about how to successfully use lighting to your advantage to tell your story. This will mean that you’ll need to think about how to light different layers of your composition differently. For example, to help draw attention to your foreground object you may want to have a few stops difference in lighting between the background and foreground. This is easy to do in a studio environment when you fully control lighting, but it’s also possible to look for natural lighting variations in outdoor environments. For example, look at the natural shadows that the trees create in the background of this image:

http://www.ijproductions.com/images/fashion/fashion-photography-10.jpg

And look at how the light hits and is reflected off the water differently in different places.

http://www.romansalickiphotography.com/Flash%20images/nature2.jpg

Notice how this helps draw your attention to specific areas.

Great work on your first assignment!

[Author]

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