Monday 5 March 2012

Critique

Golden hour on Golden Gate Bridge, Richard Misrach

I can make some (I hope) constructive remarks on your photographs if you send me a couple, or send links to where I can see them.
Alberto's been busy again. The first is a classic landscape shot, using the very still water for reflections and making use of the warm, directional light from the setting sun accentuating the warm tones of the crags. 
Perhaps surprisingly, warm light is in fact relatively cool in temperature. If you heat anything, it starts off yellow and gets bluer as it gets hotter before reaching an almost white heat. As the sun goes down and the temperature drops, the 'colour temperature' of the light drops too, creating colour that is rich in yellows and reds. This is why people call it the golden hour. We think of these colours as warm because we associate them with candles and cozy fireplaces.
Digital cameras allow you to set the colour temperature, so that the camera is calibrated to record colour more accurately - it's usually called white balance, because you are setting white to record as white and not with an unwanted colour cast. If you set the white balance for use indoors, in warm-toned candle light, your pictures would show the scene without much colour cast. If you then went out into the bright daylight without re-setting the white balance, the pictures would be blue, because daylight has a much hotter colour temperature, and this is bluer. 
The second is an experiment with slow shutter speeds to convey movement in the city. A very atmospheric result. This technique does benefit from a tripod, and these types of image can be more successful if some parts of the scene are sharp, as this gives the eye something familiar and understandable to hold onto. There is a strong diagonal in this picture, which is very suitable for a picture that is showing motion. In composition, diagonal lines are usually thought of as dynamic, and encourage the eye to move round the picture. Straight horizontal and vertical lines are often more static, and create images that are more still.
Another convention relates to how you hold the camera. Upright pictures like these are often known as portrait in format - because they suit portraits of people. Holding the camera horizontally is called landscape, because it is so useful for photographing places, where most of the points of interest occur horizontally. Most of Alberto's pictures are shot as portraits, and I would suggest he tries using the landscape orientation more, to convey space. And many of the motion and blur pictures contain straight horizontals and verticals, so try using the escalators to create diagonal lines that divide the picture in unequally - I say unequally because these shots are trying to show movement, motion and dynamism. Equal, balanced compositions with straight lines are quite still. Unequal, diagonal compositions convey movement, and rely on a dynamic equilibrium rather than static balance for their composition.


Dynamic diagonal composition by Rene Burri, a Magnum photojournalist who was fascinated by city architecture.






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