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11/10/16 – Composition

In today’s lab, we went over the basics of composition for photography, including techniques such as the rule of thirds, frames within a frame, the Fibonacci spiral, and more. The main task was to go out from Tower C and take a series of photographs on our mobile phones. Each of these had to be around a certain theme: Line, Space, Time, Motion, Volume or Mass, Value, Texture, Colour, Shape.

Below are my submissions for photos in each of the nine categories along with a few notes on why they were taken and how they were edited. They were all taken on my iPhone, and are all square. This fits in with the rest of my photography work from the last academic year, and also with the regular and geometric design of my website. I prefer regular shapes that can be tessellated and arranged in a grid. I briefly edited each one using Adobe Photoshop before uploading them.

// Value

// Line

// Time

// Texture

// Space

// Shape

// Motion

// Volume

// Colour

Value: This image is edited simply by increasing the contrast levels and decreasing the saturation, to make the numbers on the lock really stand out from the rest of the metal.

Line: For this image, I liked the way the crack drew the viewer’s eye across the entire width. It is a type of line, however it is not uniform and therefore interesting to look at.

Time: For this category, I tried to think outside the box a little. If I stood in the same place, my own shadow on the floor would grow, shrink and rotate over time, in a similar way to the shadow on a sundial moves.

Texture: This image was fairly boring in my opinion, even after increasing the saturation and variance in Photoshop. In order to make it more interesting and visually appealing, I rotated the image round 180 degrees. However, this made the composition not look right, so I then flipped the image about a vertical axis.

Space: The majority of this image is just empty sky. The tall chimney, at an angle, occupies only a small space. I edited the saturation slightly to make the blue more intense- thus giving the impression of nothingness.

Shape: Choosing an image to represent this category was fairly tricky. In the end I settled on this one as there are multiple simple, geometric shapes present. The corner where the wall and floor lines intersect creates interesting angles, as well as the circular ceiling light and cuboidal emergency light on the wall.

Motion: I found this category the most challenging of the whole task. Finding something to represent motion while still being a photograph with a well thought-out composition was difficult, so instead I used an object that most people would be able to readily associate with motion instead. Upon seeing the image, the motion of an opening door springs easily to the mind.

Mass/Volume: I chose this photo for the Mass/Volume category rather than the Colour category because I liked the effect it created, where you can’t tell whether the shape is going inwards or outwards – it is a 3D image without the viewer being entirely sure what they are looking at.

Colour: For this image I created a mask in Photoshop and desaturated the building to a point where it is pretty much a greyscale image. This leaves the plain, unedited blue of the sky as the main feature of the photo. I liked the way there is a very subtle change in the shade of blue from top to bottom.

References and Further Reading: