Horizontal and vertical lines

Produce four examples of horizontal and four of vertical lines avoiding repeating the way each line appears as far as possible.

Vertical lines

Lockers

 The straight lines of these lockers immediately stood out from their surroundings at the local cricket club. I took photos from several angles and directions and found this vertical framing to be the most pleasing.

Trees along the pavement

 There are quite a few lines going on here. The tree trunks provide fairly stark contrast against the receding lines of the road, pavement and verge.

Old window

Whilst there are both horizontal and vertical lines here, the vertical lines dominate with the strong contrast between light and dark areas of the photograph.

Belle

 My daughter provides the obvious vertical line in this photograph although there are additional vertical lines courtesy of the gate and tree in the background.

Horizontal lines

Through the stairs

Shooting from behind this staircase produced some very strong contrast as the backs were deep in shadow thanks to the light coming from a skylight above.

Rafters

 

I was able to take this shot by climbing on to the top of a stack of hay to get up to the roof (please don’t go trying similar unless you know what your doing, not all hay stacks are created equally!). I deliberately included the light as I wanted a point to capture the eye.

Round bale detail

 Lots of lines here, the individual black and white lines form four larger bands. They all serve to draw the eye towards the number 9.

Belle on a bench

 Whilst my daughter is clearly star of the show here again, the strong horizontal lines of the bench serve to draw the eye to her here. Ideally I would have been able to add some symmetry by placing her bang in the middle but the bench is a bit rickety. Didn’t want the poor maid getting stabbed by wayward splinters!

To conclude

I had a few restrictions in place when taking the photos for this exercise. All of the locations were fairly compact so, no room for say, a horizon which would be quite an obvious subject for a horizontal line. In addition, I found myself being drawn to subjects with multiple target lines rather than looking for just the one line.

Exercise 16: Multiple points

The aim of this exercise is to create a still life arrangement to experiment with multiple points.

Two things quickly became apparent.

• Creating a halfway decent still life isn’t quite as easy as it looks

• I suck at creating them.

I have to confess that I didn’t hugely enjoy this exercise, the still life it seems, just isn’t my thing! I experimented with toys (plenty of those with a toddler) and with with the contents of a kitchen cupboard.

For the set up, I mounted the camera on a tripod pointing towards our dining room table and for lighting I used a hot shoe flash with a black card snoot to create more of a circle of light (not hugely apparent with some baking paper acting as a diffuser as using a bare flash against the table created some nasty blue reflections. May as well get it right in camera rather than spend lots of time post processing..

 

I’ve more or less plonked this in the middle of the frame as it seems the most natural point to begin with.

 

In the second photo I’ve added some more sauce and some chilli to create a triangle although the shadow from the big bottle breaks this up slightly.

 With another bottle added, the caps of the three bottles now form the points of an inverted triangle.

A small spice jar is added to the mix. Rather than add to the group I want to start off a second grouping.

In addition to another jar being added, I’ve moved the first group to the right of the frame to create some balance.

 

For the final photo, I’ve added one extra spice jar to which creates a second triangle. I did experiment with extra objects but they were beginning to clutter up the frame somewhat.

Having packed up, I should have removed or moved the jar of chillies added in the second photo as it seems out of place.

 

Finally, I’ve sketched over the final image to show the two triangles created by the objects.

 

I think for future still life work I’m going to have to either work with much smaller objects or in a bigger space. I did have some limitations here although I don’t want to use that as an excuse for what I perceive at least to be a bit of a rubbish piece of work.

Exercise 15: Positioning a point

Examples of points.

A tree in a landscape

A single animal in a field

A bird or insect against the sky

The sun, moon, or a cloud

Aircraft in flight

A single person

A leaf floating on water

Signs

Strong shadows, or bright spots from a shaft of light

A lit window at night

Lone buildings

Photos chosen for the exercise.

Hatherleigh Silver Band

This one jumped out at me the moment I saw the sign which had obviously been pinched by someone and chucked in to a flood relief channel. Once I’d got to the overlooking wall in order to be able to shoot from above I composed the photo in such a way as to draw the eye in to the sign from the top left hand corner of the frame.

Litter

I tried framing the crisp packet centrally for my second photo as framing it in a corner would have introduced different kinds of background (hedge above, tarmac below) which I felt wouldn’t have worked. I find it interesting how that the orientation of the packet with relation to the rest of the frame creates a sense of movement toward the lower right of the frame. I experimented further by cropping the photo to place the crisp packet in the top left producing a more conventional, off centre positioning of the point.

Litter (cropped)

Turning

 Taken trough the gateway of the field, I positioned the tractor centrally but slightly left offset in order to emphasise the tractors movement and show where its heading. However, in this case of this photo, the direction the tractor also provides movement and cropping as to centrally place the point works too.