Brief
“1. Take two or three photographs in which a single point is placed in different parts
of the frame.
2. Take a number of images in which a point is placed in relationship to the frame.”
For this exercise I chose to photograph a shrub in the garden with a single yellow flower. I composed the images with the flower in various positions in the frame. I have included here a contact sheet of all the images I took. They are taken with the camera set on Automatic and I have applied slight development settings in Lightroom, to bring out the detail in the petals of the yellow flower. Otherwise there is no post-processing manipulation of the image. In particular, the images are not cropped from the camera.
Evaluation:
The foliage in general was fairly uniform. I found that depending on where the yellow flower was positioned, to a greater or lesser extent my eye is drawn to different areas of the foliage.
In this image (Image 1) the composition seems balanced: the flower is balanced by a darker area of foliage to the right of the image. I had not noticed this when I took the shot. Ther is also a suggestion of a diagonal line running top left to bottom right, formed by the buds of the nearest branches, behind which the foliage is out of focus – again not deliberate.
Similarly with this image where the flower is placed higher in the frame, but again about one third in from the left edge of the frame. It feels balanced and again my eye sees pattern in the rest of the foliage which I had not noticed when I took the shot.
In this image (Image 3) the flower is central and symmetrically balanced by darker areas at each side of the frame. However, I do not find this as satisfactory as the two previous one – I think because of the symmetry removing a feeling of tension in the balance.
In these images (Image 4 and Image 5) the flower is placed at the edge of the frame, and I find my eye almost overlooks it and is drawn to find pattern and interest in other parts of the image. In Image 5 the lighter area to the left has other less contrasting features, but they seem to draw greater attention than I thought they would when I took the shot.
In image 6, the flower is at the edge of the frame, but unlike the two previous images, further medially, and the eye notices it more. I notice that I see the yellow flower at the top of the image even though it is in the distance and out of focus. I think that this is because my eye goes from the prominent lower flower along a line to the higher one.
Andrew Procter 