Feedback on First Assignment: Contrasts

Generally, I was pleased with the photos I submitted for the first assignment, and I was pleased with my tutor's feedback. In a nutshell, I would say about half of my pairings worked quite well. The other half didn't. The main reason they didn't work was that they didn't clearly communicate what I intended. Even though I received positive feedback on the overall quality of the photographs, the main point of the assignment was to clearly communicate something. Indeed, my tutor provided great feedback when he said, "Art is about communication."

This is what I struggled with as I put together my pairings. On the one hand I wanted to be creative but for the pairings that didn't work, while I may have been creative, I didn't communicate clearly enough.

For example, in this pairing, I chose to communicate translucent and opaque. The first photo is pretty clearly translucent, and needs no title or explanation. The second photo is supposed to be opaque, but it's difficult to tell what is opaque about it. The "opaque" in the photo is the lettering the signage that partially spells out what the building is. One must read the shadow, cast by the opaque lettering, in order to fully read the sign. I thought that by showing the relationship between the relationship between the sign and its shadow, the viewer would experience opaque.

I will say though, that the opaque photo is probably the very first photo where I actually felt like an artist. I noticed the relationship between the sign and its shadow out of the corner of my eye when I was driving down the street and it immediately struck me. So I parked my car, and fortunately had my Hasselblad with me. The composition came together very easily and the final product matches almost exactly the vision I was going for. So even though it didn't work for the assignment, it is an important photograph to me.

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I did have some pairings that worked well. An example of this is my "Straight/Curved." I like both of these photos because not only to the visually communicate what they're suppose to, they also express the feeling I was going for in each. Especially the curved guitar. With this one, I played around with the positioning, lighting, and exposure to get the sharp contrast along the curved lines as a way to draw attention to that area. I think it worked well, and I was pleased with the results.








The final example I'll share here is my photo that shows both contrasts in the same photograph. For this one, I chose "Still/Movement." This is a photo of a water feature at an office building. I exposed it for about 1 minute to capture the movement of the water. I positioned myself so I could place the highlight at the top of the waterflow so the eye would certainly be drawn there then follow the line down to the light area where the waterfall enters the pond. I think this clearly shows movement. The sculpture itself is still, but so too are the trees in the background, and the rock feature in the pond. Highlights in the trees near the pond form a shape that almost identically matches the shape of the rocks, which I feel helps pull the composition together. I was a little bit concerned the photo might be too dark, but I think it holds up well, and I'm not experienced enough yet in the darkroom (or with photoshop) to lighten it without raising up the highlights too much. And in the end, I think it works as is.



All in all, I was quite pleased with my photos and the very constructive feedback I received from my tutor. In future assignments, I will work to err on the side of communicating more clearly, even if it results in simpler compositions.