Exploring rules

Will I color outside the lines?  Where are the lines?

When I was a child, my parents never asked me to do or not do anything without explaining why.  So rules never existed “just because”, but for a reason.  And if a reason could be explained, it could therefore be questioned. 

As an adult, having never taken a formal photography course, I’ve not had rules about taking photographs handed to me.  But over the course of time through reading articles, taking my own photographs, and also doing various kinds of design work in 2D, I realize I have absorbed and developed a set of rules.  It’s time to examine and question them.

Most of them involve aesthetics, but some relate to subject matter and to the emotional impact of the photo on other people. 

I usually aim for a sense of balance in composition.  There can be open, vacant space if it serves to balance another area that’s rich with content (detail, or emotional content, or whatever).  Dark and light areas should be roughly equal – the image should not seem under- or overexposed.  Any visual “weight” should be in the lower portion, so the image doesn’t seem top-heavy.   Now when I seriously consider these, I don’t think there’s a single one that couldn’t be ignored for the sake of effect.

In fact, I think that’s the key - intended effect.  For instance, I can ignore a rule that the main subject should be in focus, if the intent is to show motion. Or the photo can look accidental, haphazard, if the intent is to suggest confusion or disorientation.

What’s been very interesting to me in examining my “rules” is that sometimes I apply rules or principles to my own photographs that I don’t at all mind seeing other photographers break.

For example, I would not think to crop off part a person’s or animal’s face, but I’ve seen interesting photographs that did just that, including one of a horse by one of the members in the January Find Your Eye class, where I thought it worked VERY effectively.  The muzzle was cut off.  This did two things: it gave more emphasis to the remarkable expression in the horse’s eye and it also reminded me of the way a horse will move its head, like the photo caught it in motion.

Another rule I apply to my own work is that an image can be a little disturbing, but not too much so, even though I find it perfectly all right for others to take disturbing photos.  I faced the question of how edgy I was willing to be after I took the photograph below.

This image to me is not at all disturbing, only intriguing, a bit mysterious.  But after I took the photo, I discovered that the billboard advertised a charity that does surgery on cleft palates, and it was that portion of the child’s face that was blocked by the tree.  For several days I considered going back and taking a second photo with the mouth showing, and wrestled with whether it would cross the line, not for anyone else to have taken, but for me to take.  I thought I could at least take it and then decide, but in the end I let it go.  I still regret my decision.  However, for the sake of this lesson, I searched the internet, figured out what charity it was (Smile Train) and even found the same child’s photo on their website.  With a bit of manipulation in Photoshop I’ve managed to recreate the way it might have looked.

In this case, I don’t think the inclusion of the cleft palate enhances the photo in any way; in fact, it detracts – the disturbing aspect here is merely gratuitously so.  Not all impulses to take certain photos are good ones.  

It’s still my own choice generally NOT to take disturbing photos, but I’ve decided I don’t want to make that a rule that limits me.   I’d rather learn from a mistake and discard a photo later than regret not taking it in the first place.

Inspiration(s)

Common and uncommon threads

For a better understanding of what inspires me to photograph, I went back through my digital files starting with the most recent.   I knew I’d been tending recently to simply use my camera to document things or places, but was surprised to see how far back I had to go – about two years – to gather 20-25 images that really had an emotional charge for me.  But that’s why I began the Find Your Eye courses – to return to photography as a more personal expression.

After spending hours with them, thinking about what compelled me to take the picture, looking among them for similar themes: of subject, composition, mood, etc, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t come to a conclusion.  At least not a single one, more like two or three...or five or six.

I’ve always thought that if I could have my fantasy house, I’d like enough rooms to indulge a taste for different decorating schemes: one neutral, calm, very spare, Japanese; another exotic, densely ornamented in glowing colors with Moroccan lamps and carpets; another a sunny garden room, full of plants, hammocks, a floor of Saltillo pavers.  Not surprisingly I found my photographs heading in very different directions too.

On one hand I’m drawn to the exuberant, voluptuous, sumptuous, like these:

This ride's form and colors obsessed me, though you can't see the peaked top here.
I wanted to focus on the center and capture the movement by letting the riders fly outward off the frame

only a portion of the splendor of Oakland's Paramount Theater

On the other hand simple, subdued, even sometimes stark images also attract me:

 

In some of my photos, like most of the ones above, a single strong impression comes through – whatever is there, it’s full-on 100% there. Others are ambiguous and nuanced, like this mysterious child on a billboard

(it turned out to be an ad for the charity that does surgery on cleft palates, though I didn’t realize that until later because the trees blocked that part of her face), or the poignant one below.  Here the glowing summer amusement park colors implying laughter and fun meet the silent and bored isolation of the vendor as the sun goes down in the lull between the day and evening crowds.

I also like to photograph the outright funny, like those little white dogs wearing sunglasses and the tasty salted pig parts booth in my January 10 post.  Flowers are another frequent subject, usually close portraits.

In composition, I notice I use a couple of approaches. In asymmetrical photos, I try to balance open areas with detailed areas, and can’t resist alignment with vertical and horizontal elements, as in some of the images in my January 20 post.  But I also have the strong counter impulse to get right up on a subject, centering it in the frame.  I’m fond of symmetry even if it’s not considered sophisticated.

If there’s been any change in my tendencies over time, it’s probably been an increasing impulse toward color and exuberance.  For pure inspiration, I can easily say the photographic setting/subject that thrilled me most in the past several years is the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk in late afternoon, early evening, though I was also strongly affected by that sofa and painting above in the Oakland Museum.  I need to find more subjects that excite me that much.

50 photos of a favorite subject

How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.

The assignment this week was to take 50 photographs of a familiar subject, challenging me to go beyond my familiar ways of seeing it.  It turned out to be an exhilarating, liberating experience.  I chose a sweet baby cyclamen in a little stoneware pot that sits out on the railing of the stairs to my side yard.  It was already an inspiration for having grown itself from a seed of a spent flower dropped from an old gift plant.  After putting out four little leaves this past fall, it couldn’t wait to start blooming and by Thanksgiving was showing off the same flowers that are still on it now in mid January, though it did produce one more leaf.  Here it is in a no frills photo at the beginning of this exercise, with the neighboring apartment building in the background.

To increase the challenge, I decided not to move the pot in any way and to accept the fact that this area at this time of year is in perpetual shade.  So no lovely sunlight through the petals. 

Now the adventure began.  Once I get behind the lens, time means nothing, unless I happen to be with someone else who’s operating on Human Standard Time.  Since I was alone here, I kept going until my fingers got too cold, took a break and then went at it again.  I easily took more than 100 photos.  In the evening I sorted through the images I’d taken, decided I’d missed some options, and took another 50 shots the next day.

None are outstanding, but here are a few I sort of like and probably wouldn’t have taken were it not for this assignment.



I considered editing out that little bit of stem on the lower left, but the photo seems somehow weaker without it, as though it provides a hint of anchoring context.

 

I like the slight moodiness here.  And with all but the flowers quite neutral it almost looks like a black and white photo except for the jolt of magenta.  The patches of light on the wall are bounced reflections off the windows of the neighboring building.



The most fun came when I’d exhausted the obvious angles and distances.  In fact I began to experiment with being playfully, willfully “baaad,” by which I mean deliberately breaking as many of my unspoken rules of what a photograph should look like as I could.  Because this entire experience was far more important for me than any of the resulting images, I’m going to show a slew of examples below, including “wrong” ones. 



I framed with the image divided almost in quarters



I ignored most of the plant



I got as far away as I could without losing the color of the cyclamen



more deliberately odd framing



leaving most of the frame empty



focussing entirely on the background and abstracting the flowers

I’ve gained so much that I think I’d like to do this 50 (or more) challenge at least once a month.  The only drawback is that the amount of time taking the photos didn’t come close to the amount of time I spent poring over them afterward, assessing and sometimes making Photoshop adjustments. But I wasn’t bored or tired of the process for a second.  

Why take photographs?

Or at least why do I?

Currently I take two very different sorts of pictures - the ones I feel inspired, even compelled, to take for their own sake and the ones I take to document bits of my daily life for the friends who now live too far away. 

It’s the photos I take because I’m moved in some way that I’m thinking about here.  Something I’ll see amazes or captivates me for any of many reasons: beauty, poignancy, mystery, humor, the unexpected, some reasons I can’t even explain. That’s a moment of heightened experience – I feel alert and excited when I’m connecting with a subject that interests me.  Without a camera I could certainly absorb the experience, and then hold it in my memory or let it float away like everything else that’s ephemeral.  So why the urge to photograph it?  I think because at that moment what I’m seeing is possessing me, and I in turn want to possess it.  There may be some sort of basic instinct in this, like magpies and crows snatching and hoarding bright shiny things.  I confess I’m a hoarder of images.  Lucky for me the digital ones take up so little space.

 

Three friends out for a walk in Oakland.  It turns out those glasses
 really are made for dogs and you can order them online

The camera can stop time, or at least catch a piece of it – I can feel like I have that moment back again whenever I look at the photo.  I love being able to revisit places I’ve been, and I can revisit the self I was when I took the picture.

winding through San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

And of course, I have an impulse to share what I saw with anyone else who might appreciate it as I do.  So it’s a means of connecting with others, in the same way I feel a connection to some photographer or artist I’ll never meet who created an image out of a sensibility similar to mine.

I know some of the things that attract me, and some I’m still in the process of discovering.

Plant and flower forms interest me. 

Certain color combinations.

Extreme close-ups.  I want to go in macro-close sometimes – I like the sense of intimacy it creates, the shift in scale taking me into another world, or as though I could get deeper into the heart of something. 

Outlines and other things that emphasize line; shapes that line up in a serendipitous way.

People.  Well, I’ve got mixed impulses here.  I love seeing other photographers’ images of interesting people, but I feel very awkward about taking them myself, not wanting to intrude or offend.  At an early age I must have been told it’s not polite to stare at people, and what’s an aimed camera but an ultra supreme stare.

Odd, ambiguous or inexplicable signage. 

coming soon to a farmers' market near you



 The daily life documentation photos pretty much take care of themselves. They serve their purpose as long as I give them enough light and reasonably crisp focus,

like this one, to show my friends a couple of the tomatoes I grew in a plastic tub in my side yard – a variety called “Celebrity” – with virtually no seeds and very red flesh throughout.

This has been a good exercise – raising many more questions for me about my relationship to photography than I’ve managed to answer.   The photographs I included in this post were taken with my S70, but I'll soon be doing more with the new camera.

Setting out...

about this blog and my new camera

This will be a photojournal of visual and personal exploration following the guidance of an online photography teacher/muse.  There’s a button link to Find Your Eye in the sidebar.

The photo of poppies I used for my profile image here wasn’t done for the course – it’s one I took several years ago – nor do I think it’s a “great” photo, but I chose it for two reasons:

1.  It makes me smile.  It’s a warm cheerful welcome for me when I come here to post and for anyone else who comes by to visit.

2.  It represents a personal lesson I want to keep in mind.  If I had consciously set out to show off the intense color of those flowers, my first thought would have been to photograph them against a white or black background, or at least something of very light or dark value, so they’d stand out well.  The background here simply happens to be the khaki/taupe color of the house I live in.  In this particular case, because the values are relatively closer and don’t contribute much to separating the flowers from the background, it’s the color that has to do the work, competing for attention, which I think gives the image an energy it wouldn’t otherwise have had.  So my lesson in this is to let go of assumptions and keep my mind and eye open.

Now about my new camera – it’s a Canon Powershot S100 and it suits my needs PERFECTLY!  I love it so much I hope I don’t make my boyfriend jealous.

I already have a Canon SLR film camera with multiple lenses, which served me so well I resisted switching to digital for a long time.  Until I got a little Powershot S70 six years ago.  What a wonder!  I converted to digital immediately.  It looked like a very modest point and shoot, but actually had all the manual controls I was used to on my SLR.  For me it had only one glaring flaw: the manual focusing method, which required inconvenient finger contortions and eyesight good enough to see a tiny inner focus screen.

So eventually I decided to get a new camera and seriously considered a digital SLR.  But here’s why I chose the S100.  Excellent technical features – 12.1 megapixel CMOS sensor (yes, I know megapixel count isn’t everything), lens range equivalent to a 24mm-120mm zoom, very fast new image processor, 3” screen, and many bells and whistles and more bells, such as 3 color histograms in addition to regular light/dark, hi-def movies, GPS.  I AM a clever monkey, but this camera knows more than I do.  You can read more about all that here if you like http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canons100/  Plus fully automatic to fully manual and everything in between.

But beyond that I want a camera I can easily carry with me at all times – the S100 is so small in my purse that I sometimes have to fish around a bit and it’s just not that large a purse.  I want to be able to take candid photos unobtrusively.  My income is modest by American standards, but I want to be able to take photographs in parts of my own city and especially in some foreign countries where I’m rich by local standards. I don’t want to be using a camera that looks very expensive (the little S100 isn’t really cheap at close to $500 including tax and memory card, but it looks insignificant), partly to avoid being ripped off, but mainly and more importantly out of sensitivity to the people I’m among.