This exercise made me procrastinate a lot. It seemed straight-forward enough at first, but the more I read it the more I felt confused. The idea was to take three separate features (a child, building and tree) and then play with composition and perspective to explore the different relationships.
Rather than search the internet for ‘perfect’ images to use, I went for a nice walk with my son instead. On the way we stopped to take pictures and when we got home we sat together to decide which images we wanted to use for my exercise. I took these images, and then manipulated them to have many different sizes of the same image on an A3 sheet. I also turned the images to grey scale digitally. You can see the different sizes in the gallery below:
I printed out each A3 sheet, and proceeded to it them out into individual images. While I was cutting, I decided that the image of the child (my son) and the house had too much background information which added unnecessary context. So I decided to crop them closely to create a siloette that was more useful.
I understood that doing this exercise with physical media would be most useful for my learning, but I still had reservations about the amount of paper that would be used and subsequently wasted. This was compounded by the fact that I needed to try different compositions and potentially use multiple different horizon lines.
Using pencil for this would have resulted in confused images, ans I knew I couldn’t guarantee that I could erase each line fully. By the end my square piece of paper would have been criss-crossed with multiple lines. I came up with an idea to use a fine length of cotton, taped to my desk. That way I could move the paper underneath and then photograph the result.
I went through a number of compositions using the three elements. At the end I also experimented with using multiples of the images that I had created, and had a lot of fun trying things that were a little more surreal.
The relationship of the figure to the other elements was very interesting. When the figure is smaller, the natural feeling is that of distance. But what I found interesting was the importance that the horizon line played in the relationship. Just because something is small, it doesn’t mean that it can’t dominate the picture. I particularly liked the composition with the child and tree at the top near a very high horizon line. This gave a sense of being above, and of power. The eye is drawn to the focus of the boy and in that, he dominates your attention.
When I placed elements at angles to each other it resulted in a few different dynamics. Sometimes it felt chaotic, but in others it gave a sense of speed and direction. There was one composition where the house and the boy are leaning to the left. This felt to me like it created a sense of tension and apprehension towards the tree. When all the elements were aligned and perpendicular to the frame, there was more a sense of structure, safety and order. It also gave a more comfortable feeling. This made me think I about when I could use angles to create a sense of tension or focus when I want to evoke those feelings in the viewer.
My favourite composition is shown to the right. This one started by me playing with having no horizon line at all. By layering items at the bottom Of the frame it dropped the horizon off the bottom of the page. I liked this because it draws your eye to the sky, and this perspective actually makes you feel small and vulnerable - almost childlike. I drew on this feeling, and played with playing the image of the child almost horizontal. I enjoyed how it suggested that he was flying, and the composition actually added to a sense of wonder and magic. Almost like I was looking up at the world like a child does.
I am also really pleased with how I managed to overcome my apprehension to do this exercise, and how I felt comfortable to get to a place where I felt it was right to break the rules and experiment for my sake, and not the experiment’s. If I hadn’t I wouldnt have found a composition I enjoyed so much. I showed it to a few people for some feedback, and they remarked how it could actually be an album cover. I was very proud of that.
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