Exercise 6

Project - Looking through the viewfinder

Exercise - Fitting the frame to the subject

For this exercise I chose my car as the subject. I wanted a setting which was simple and potentially slightly industrial, ideally industrial wasteland. Frustratingly most areas that I could find which fitted this description were inaccessible by car. However, I spotted that there was some interesting aspects to the place where I park my car everyday.

The exercise states to take 4 shots:

1. "normal" or uncomposed - taken without too much thought
2. tightly composed - filling the frame as much as possible
3. within landscape - stress the surroundings of the subject
4. detail - close in on a small section of the subject

Once complete, the next step is to produce alternative crops.

"normal" / uncomposed  - shot 1

tightly composed - shot 1

I was surprised at how tight I was able to get in to the car. I would have had to have got up higher in order to get a tighter fit.

within landscape - shot 1

I like the banding of colours and the contrast of the industrial/mechanistic car and car park and the landscape and sky behind it. The effect of this would have been better if the trees were straight band which didn't curve upwards on the right hand side.

within landscape - shot 2

detail - shot 1

The interesting thing while taking these detailed shots was dealing with the highly reflective surface. In shot 1 above I liked the introduction of the reflected tree and how it contrasts with the hard lines of the car.

I feel that shot 2 would have been better without the reflection of the house.

In both shots I kept the depth of field shallow in order to add to the depth and to the abstract quality of the shots.

detail - shot 2

I also wanted to play with having myself reflected in the shot (inspired by Lee Friedlander). This was fun, but kind of pointless - wasn't really sure what point I was trying to make. It just served to remind me how skilled and considered Friedlander's shots are!

detail alternative 1

detail alternative 2

Crops

The next part of the exercise is to create some cropped versions of the above images. I concentrated on cropping the shots where there is more distance from the subject as this offered the most scope for alternatives.

I went for a square crop first. This also cuts out the sky and slices the background into 3 equal stripes - which I think works pretty well and adds to the graphical quality of the shot.

crop 1 of shot 1

 In the next crop I took out the foreground - again this simplifies the composition, but make the top feel a bit uncontained.

crop 2 of shot 1

 In the frist crop of the next shot I focussed on the foreground. However the foreground is pretty dull so the shot doesn't really work.

crop 1 of shot 2

 Another crop which cuts out the foreground. This one works better than the other crop which includes the sky as it looks more purposeful - probably because there's so much of it and it kind of balances out as it's half the image. I've also offset the car in order to stop it weighing too heavy at the bottom of the page.

crop 2 of shot 2

 The final crop is of the "uncomposed" shot. I've simply cut off the distracting band of sky at the top of the image. I've also removed some of the lens distortion which was bending the building in the background. This has emphasised the straight lines which has helped the shot.

crop 1 of uncomposed shot