Exercise 22 - Adjusting the balance between person and space

20 December 2010

In this exercise I have to vary the balance in any picture situation. I need to produce 2 images, using the same general viewpoint and composition varying the balance of attention between the person (or people) and the setting they are in. I have taken many views with people included and will search my archives to see what I can find.

These images show the same couple sitting on a groyne on Lyme Regis Town Beach. Both  taken from the same point but with no zoom and zoom extended.

First image

Image one is showing the couple sitting at a distance with a large area of beach and harbour surrounding them. They are lost in the picture but do add a focal point to the picture, not the first thing you notice but at least the eye has something to settle on as it travels round the picture. The people are on one of the 1/3rds but almost halfway down the image which is not the best position.

Second Image

The second image shows the couple in a much better position whereby they are on the cross between upright and horizontal thirds. The whole image is compacted with your eye going straight to the couple, a strong focal point.

The water forms a strong lead to the harbour in the middle distance and the sky has enough detail to have an interest. Plain grey skies have no real pulling power and the image usually ends up with a diffused muddy grey look.

Exercise 23 - Selective processing and prominence

This exercise asks me to take one image that I have already taken for an earlier exercise, an image in which the issue is the visual prominence of a figure in a setting. The ain of this exercise is to use the digital processing methods I have available on my computer to make two new versions of this image.  In one make the figure less prominent and in the second do the opposite, by making it stand out more.  The actual technique will depend on the processing software available, eg, Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, etc.

Original Image

I've been taking pictures for Assignment 4, an upmarket travel brochure of a place I know, and have produced this image. It's fine for the cottages but the lady walking up the hill is rather dark. I need to lighten her but not the surrounding area.

Using the Levels feature (screen shot)

Here you can see how I have used the quick mask to carefully select just her so I can use Levels to lighten her and not the background.

Completed picture

This last image shows how I have made the woman lighter but not adjusted her surrounding area. This shows her in more detail but doesn't lose the background details. I tried to be subtle and not overdo the lightening as she could look rather strange as she is in shadow. I find, when using Levels, you need to be careful to not overdo the adjustments.

Exercise 21 - Making figures anonymous

The purpose of this exercise is to discover ways of including a person or people in a photograph while deliberatly making them unrecognisable and, as a result, less prominent.

I took this picture recently when working on an earlier exercise and when I looked at it, thought that unless you knew the person, they remained perfectly anonymous in the shot as they were in silhouette. I think it works well and I was extremely lucky to have a friendly neighbourhood seagull flying by just as I took the shot.

It could be any person sitting there as he is in silhouette.

I know that I have used the image below in the previous exercise but there is nothing more guaranteed to make someone anonymous than to catch them moving in your picture. As I said before, I took several images of people in a small courtyard and combined them into one to show more movement that I had managed to achieve in each individual picture.
I like this, I deliberately chose people who were either caught in a blur or were colourful.

I'll continue with this exercise and see what else I can find as I think I can discover other ways of being anonymous.

Here's a panorama of my local church with 2 figures standing in the middle of the aisle. As they are such a small part of the whole, they are fairly inconspicuous to the viewer. The whole picture, when stitched together, was 24.5 inches by 3.6 inches which gives a very narrow view of the church inside. You would need a piece of specialist equipment such as a gigapan to get a much wider view.

Exercise 20 - Busy traffic

I had a problem with this exercise as I had just changed my camera from a Nikon D200 professional body to a Nikon D5000 consumer body and as such do not have the range of features with regard to speed and aperture that I had before. As it was I had to up the ISO from 100 to 800 to get any movement in the shots at all. When I tried to take some decent images on the seafront with the sun shining down on a small car park, there was almost complete burnout of the images.

In the end I took several pictures at our local Town Mill with the camera on a tripod. The shutter was as slow as I could get it with the smallest aperture (f22 at 1/8th second). I decided to import the main movements from each individual photo to one main image and combine.

Completed combined image

I had fun with this picture cutting, erasing and combining all the pictures. I thought that with the limitations of my equipment, I did quite a good job.

Exercise 19 - A single figure small

I was out looking for pictures around Lyme Regis to illustrate this exercise and, saw this backpack all alone on the shingle beach. I know it's not a figure but it looked good, and then along came a seagull and friend into the picture, even better.

 Sans seagull

With seagull

I think the seagull adds a balance and interest that the first picture was lacking. I always think that an object placed on the left hand side looks better as it allows the eye to move around the picture and the seagull draws it back round again. Sans seagull your eye would move on out of the picture and on to the next one. 

Single figure small

I took this picture of the fisherman further along the beach and liked the way his legs were almost a mirror image of the stand he was using to support his fishing rod. See what you think.

Additional images
You can see some of the pictures I took for this exercise online at the following address:

http://picasaweb.google.com/108069021696054915962/Ex19SmallInPicture?authkey=Gv1sRgCOHV7ZbL-8TAUw#

From Art of Photography - Natural Light assignment

I also remembered this picture that I took for the Art of Photography Natural Light assignment. This was at the college I taught IT at where there were long corridors with windows along one side. I think this picture is just right with the figure walking away along the side, not in the centre of the corridor. I tried several different placements for the figure facing and walking away and finally decided that where she was here was just right.