Find a subject in front of a background with depth. Take a very close viewpoint and zoom in; you’ll need to be aware of the minimum focusing distance of your lens. Focus on the subject and take a single shot. Then, without changing the focal length or framing, set your focus to infinity and take…
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Exercise 2.3 : Focus
Find a location with good light for a portrait shot. Place your subject some distance in front of a simple background and select a wide aperture together with a moderately long focal length such as 100mm on a 35mm full-frame camera (about 65mm on a cropped-frame camera). Take a viewpoint about one and a half…
Exercise 2.2 : Viewpoint
“Does zooming in from a fixed viewpoint change the appearance of things? If you enlarge and compare individual elements within the first and last shots of the last exercise you can see that their ‘perspective geometry’ is exactly the same. To change the way things actually look, a change in focal length needs to be…
Exercise 2.1 : Zoom
‘ …there is no approach, approach suggests moving nearer, getting closer, suggests that we are not already near or close enough’ – Stanley Cavell Find a scene that has depth. From a fixed position, take a sequence of five or six shots at different focal lengths without changing your viewpoint. (You might like to use…
Exercise 1.4 – Frame
“The final exercise of this project makes use of the viewfinder grid display of a digital camera. This function projects a grid onto the viewfinder screen to help align vertical and horizontal lines, such as the horizon or the edge of a building, with the edge of the frame. Please check your camera manual (or…
Exercise 1.3 Line
‘Take a number of shots using lines to create a sense of depth. Shooting with a wide – angle lens (zooming out) strengthens a diagonal line by giving it more length within the frame. The effect is dramatically accentuated if you choose a viewpoint close to the line.’ Below are some photographs for this exercise…
Exercise 1.2: Point
A point is the smallest graphical element, if you join many points together you make a line. In mathematics, a point doesn’t have any weight at all, it indicates a place. So compositionally, a point has to be small within the frame and its position is generally more important than its form. Take three or…
Exercise 1.1 The Instrument
Take three or four exposures of the same scene. Don’t change anything on the camera and keep the framing the same. Preview the shots on the LCD screen. At first glance they look the same, but are they? Perhaps a leaf moved with the wind, the light changed subtly, or the framing changed almost imperceptibly…
Alana Smith 