February 25, 2010
This enigmatic image of the courtyard behind the Palais Royal in Paris,
is my choice for this week’s entry for the Alive for 365 project.
I was captivated by the architectural art, and waited quite a while until ’something’ happened. This was in the days of still shooting transparency film, and not digital where you can shoot something near endlessly. I had to wait for the shot … and when these two women walked across the frame, I waited until the moment when I felt they were in just the right spot.
For me, in this photograph they are visually in a position where your eye follows the lines in the frame. If they had been in a different place such as between the rows of striped pillars stumps, then your eye would’ve stopped there. Instead your eye now roams across the image.
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March 1, 2009
Some sayings in photography are thrown out there so often that they’ve achieved a life of their own, and become truisms that are summarily accepted and then perpetuated.
Here they are - the 10 most annoying platitudes in photography …
Actually, I was going to name this post clichés in photography, but that would imply visual clichés. But tastes differ too widely, and I wouldn’t want to be the Style Police and dictate to other photographers which subjects and approaches are deemed cool. Besides, I think the world could always use more photos of pretty girls sitting on train tracks.
So here they are – things that make me grind my teeth:
1. ”you have to know the rules to break the rules”
2. “the camera is only a tool” / ”it’s the photographer, not the camera”
3. ”zoom with your feet”
4. either / or debates
5. circular reasoning in order to rationalise something
6. “fake it until you make it” / ”but everyone started somewhere”
7. the superiority of film because of some mystical qualities
8. B&W = art
9. ambient light purists
10. “don’t worry how it looks now, just fix it in Photoshop later”
And here’s why … (more…)
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May 31, 2007
I am not a huge fan of tilted images, and I see it as an unfortunate visual ‘tic’ when I notice entire wedding galleries by other photographers where pretty much all the images are tilted at a very specific angle. That just means that little thought went into composition, and that composition and holding the camera has become a reflex action .. which just happens to include a 30′ tilt to the camera.
I tend to keep horisontal and vertical lines exactly that way … horisontal or vertical. But sometimes a tilted image just has more impact than one that is completely level. And it has been a “feel” thing for me. I never bothered to analyse why or when these images seemed to work better, since I have an aversion to over-intellectualised analysis of photography … and in this case composition. I feel that composition should be an instinctive reaction to the scene and subject.
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“There are no rules for good photographs,
there are only good photographs.”
- Ansel Adams
Problems with composition …
Most or all beginners tend to ’shoot’ pictures – the camera is aimed at the subject and then the shutter is fired. The result is one of most common errors in photographic composition – the feet of the person being photographed are cut off and lots of empty sky or dead branches or irrelevant whatever in the top half of the picture.
Also, focusing screens of manual focus SLRs have the split-image prism or microprisms in the centre. Most auto-focus cameras also focus on whatever subject is placed in the middle, although the current generation of top-end auto-focus cameras have multi-zone focusing.
Inevitably most camera users photograph their subjects that way – looking at the main subject, dead center of the frame – with disappointing results.
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