Excercise: Positioning a Point

For this exercise, I took three photographs of single point, placing it in a different part of the frame in each one. I choose to photograph a person kayaking near where I live. The text says that there are essentially three different areas to place a single point: in the center, slightly off center, and close to the edge. So that's what I've done here.


In this first photo, the kayak is in the center of the photograph. Because of the tonality, I would say that the vest on the kayaker really stands out the most, the kayak and water are very close in tone, so I think the kayaker is actually the point here. The light end of the paddles also cold be considered points. I didn't realize this at the time! You can subtly see the lines from the bottom of the photograph up to the back of the kayak formed by the wake of the boat's movement. Very subtle but there enough to show movement. I noticed these when I took the photograph and was curious to see how it would affect the image.


I placed the point off center and slightly up. I was experiementing to see how having the expanse of water to the left of the photo would affect the energy of the photograph. I also thought that having the kayak pointed slightly toward the expanse of water but not entirely would create some tension. I think it does. If it was pointed in the same direction of the expanse of water (more to the right) it would be going with the flow. But in this case it is only slightly against the flow, which I think gives a little feeling of balance. If it was pointed more to the left, I think it would create more energy.


In this last photo, I placed the point near the edge towards the center. I took this photo because I wanted to see how it affected the energy to place the point in the center/top. I thought there would be more energy because the expanse is directly between the viewer and the point. But in fact, it feels to me like there's much less energy in the photo. I think it might be because of the notion I wrote about in the previous photo, the boat is pointed directly out of the photo and is going with the flow of the energy, for the most part.