Assignment 1: Contrasts
INDIVIDUAL IMAGE: Black-white
The assignment asked you to include one image in which a pair of contrasts were visible, so I chose this photo of zebras (also taken at Singapore Zoo). A bit of an obvious choice possibly, but I still like it :)
Assignment 1: Contrasts
PAIR H: Rough-smooth
More animals, this time from Singapore Zoo. The giant turtle (86 years old) shows ‘rough’ and the rare white tiger ‘smooth’ - both its coat and the way it’s moving through the water.
Assignment 1: Contrasts
PAIR G: Hard-soft
I have to confess that these were taken before the main assignment (but within the time frame of the first course unit). Sorry. They just fitted the theme, and I was happier with them than anything I took to deliberately meet the task requirements! I photographed both the buffalo and orang-utan at a wildlife park in Kota Kinabalu.
Assignment 1: Contrasts
PAIR F: Sweet-sour
This was the most hardest pair of all - trying to suggest a taste with a visual picture. I used two fairly close-up images (no macro, unfortunately) of the sweetest and sourest things that came to mind, chocolates and lemon. Of the two I prefer the lemon picture for the 80s-looking diagonal shadows going on behind, and the way the fork and the fruit glisten in the light.
Assignment 1: Contrasts
PAIR E: Liquid-solid
I wanted to take two slightly abstract images here - one of water and one of ice. In the first I like the contrast between the crystal-clear droplets and the running stream and in the second the ghostly light that seems to be coming from the ice cube tray.
Assignment 1: Contrasts
PAIR D: Still-moving
These were taken at a katow match in Luang Prabang, Laos. It was quite dangerous sitting on the front row :) The first image (still) shows the players lining up and waiting to be called one by one for their applause; the second (moving) shows them springing into action as the first whistle blows.
Assignment 1: Contrasts
PAIR C: Transparent-opaque
This was a weird one to photograph! For ‘transparent’, I eventually found a window that I could see through, and get two levels of reflection in (me, plus the landscape behind). I’m not mad on the final picture but it’s interesting how your eye has to move forwards and backwards through the picture to make sense of it. I took the ‘opaque’ shot when I was out on a walk and suddenly noticed a surreal giant man (part of the overhead canopy advertisment) looming above the shopfronts!
Assignment 1: Contrasts
PAIR B: Straight-curved
I also used black and white for this pair as the subject was essentially ‘line’, and I wanted them to be clean. As you can probably tell, they show ping pong equipment - the net and dividing line illustrating straightness and the bat and ball edges illustrating curves.
Assignment 1: Contrasts
PAIR A: Diagonal-rounded
These pictures show the steps of a mall in Kuching (diagonal) and a bench in Kota Kinabalu (rounded). I used black and white for both of these to keep the images as simple as possible and to focus on the shapes.
Ugh. This has taken me sooo long I’m embarrassed. I’m still not sure why it was so difficult - the task itself is very straightforward! - but I’m still not happy with what I’ve done. Never mind. Here come the final images.
I’ve started work on the first formally submitted assignment on contrasts, but I’m very worried about completing it before we leave for Laos and Penang in two days’ time - for a month! Whilst I’m excited to be able to take pictures in a new place, it means there’ll be little chance of completing TAOP work whilst I’m travelling. Fingers crossed I can get some of my contrast pictures up by tomorrow…eeeek!
Exercise: cropping
In this exercise you were asked to choose three images of different subjects, present an original and a crop, and describe the decisions you made about cropping.
The first picture I chose was of a housing development in Kuching. In the original, I included a vast sky because I thought the clouds were quite dramatic; in the crop, I removed it. The effect of this is to create greater symmetry and make the subject more immediate, and the new shape of the print suggests the use of a panoramic lens. But on reflection, I think I actually prefer the original because of its more interesting viewpoint!
The second picture, of a motorbike, illustrates a more standard crop type - removing clearly extraneous elements around the edges of the image. What originally caught my eye about this scene was the colour, so I cut out the gate to the right and cropped quite close to the bike, to mirror the thin grey strip on the left created by the shutter behind the wall. In this pair, I definitely prefer the crop as the composition is more balanced.
In the last pair, of a mother holding her baby at a wedding, I decided to use a square rather than rectangular format. This allowed me to chop out the man to the left who doesn’t really add anything to the picture, and close in on the main subjects. The child is given prominence as she is in focus, but part of the mother’s face remains to provide context. Again, I much prefer the crop as it has a greater sense of intimacy.
Other photographers’ work: the frame
This is my friend Martin with some of his work at our recent exhibition. It struck me as I was completing the assignment on positioning the horizon that it was exactly this technique he had used to produce his dramatic prints. His selection was called ‘Portraits of lansdscapes’ and each contained a landscape occupying the bottom 20% of the photograph, topped up with 80% sky. I thought they worked really well as a series (I don’t have any better quality reproductions than this sadly), unlike my river experiment - I guess the critical thing is to wait for the right subjects, rather than using the only available one :)
Exercise: vertical and horizontal frames
Although the exercise asked for 20 photographs, I have only attached a couple of pertinent examples here as looking through all of them would be quite tedious (and take forever to load up!). I took all of these images around the housing estate where we live. It was definitely true that most subjects seemed more suited to a horizontal frame! - and of the photos posted here there is only one pair in which I prefer the vertical image (the sign and the mailbox).
In that first pair, the vertical image displays that tendency discussed in the course notes to place the subject/s towards the bottom of the frame - although this was partly a conscious decision to allow the roof of the house to mirror the roof of the mailbox. In the horizontal format it was hard to decide where to position the subject, as removing the house also removes the context and there was nothing interesting to either side.
In the second pair I have no strong preference for either image as they are both quite abstract, but there were more horizontal than vertical details (e.g. the paint pot) which makes the second snap slightly more engaging. The third pair were a bit of a nightmare - I loved the colours and the bold shapes but struggled to frame the images well in either format! And lastly in the fourth pair I definitely prefer the horizontal version because, again, the road adds context to the bus stop which is insufficiently interesting on its own - even with the worm’s eye viewpoint.
Exercise: positioning the horizon
For this exercise I took five shots of the river in Kuching as a storm was approaching, moving the horizon down a little each time; the two large images show the extreme ends of that spectrum. I don’t particularly like either of these images as there is not enough interest in either the ripples or the clouds to justify them taking up such a vast amount of the picture space, and they feel imbalanced.
Of the remaining three images I prefer the one where the horizon is in the centre, but I think this has as much to do with the added foreground interest (the boat and its trail, which lead the eye through the picture) as to the position of the river bank within the frame. The bottom right photo is also OK because the sky is menacing and therefore interesting so it doesn’t seem odd for it to occupy more space than the water, but the top right picture also feels awkward because there’s so much river adding nothing to the overall effect.
