Photography for International Award at DBGS
Content
When you take a photograph you are making a selection.
"To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life."
Henri Cartier Bresson
Your camera cannot caputre everything that is in front of your eyes. You must frame a part of the scene in the viewfinder and then, by pressing the shutter release, record a fraction of a second in time. If you frame a scene in another way, choose a new angle, or shoot at a different time, what you record will be completely different.
Think about what you are trying to communicate with your photograph. What do you want to include in the frame? Is there anything that you could leave out of the photograph to make it more effective? Is there something missing from the photograph that is important to the meaning of the image? What does changing the angle or framing do to the effectiveness of the photograph? Is timing important? If you are photographing something that moves or changes, like a sports event or a facial expression, two phtographs taken a fraction of a section are likely to be significantly different - that is why professionals use cameras with fast motor drives. You don't have to have a motordrive to capture the perfect image though - Henri Cartier Bresson was famous for capturing the 'decisive moment' and he used a very simple camera.
"It's about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy."
Elliott Erwitt
One of the best ways to learn is through looking at the photographs of others. Quite a lot is available on line.
If you resister on the photographic agency Magnum's site, you will have access to large galleries of superb phtographs by some of the worlds top photographers. You can register free as a student. Their address is http://www.magnum.com.
Assignment 1
Look at the work of Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Elliot Erwitt
Wikipedia articles:
Galleries:
http://www.elliotterwitt.com/lang/en/index.html
http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/cb/index.htm
http://www.robertdoisneau.com/
Henri Cartier Bresson and Elliot Erwitt were both members of Magnum.
Assignment 2
- Take photographs of somebody in your family or a friend. Try framing the person in as many different ways as possible. Here are some ideas to try:
- Close up - just the face or their hands
- Long shot - potograph the person in their enviornment
- Head and shoulders portrait
- Low angle
- From above
- In their room, workshop or study
- With things that are important to them or that symbolise the job they do
- In an unusual place
- With nothing in the photograph apart from them - e.g. against a plain white background
Assessment
Share 5 of your own photographs with the Flikr group that demonstrate how you have explored different ways to frame a photograph.
