Tuesday, April 14 photographing anything; lighting and composition

Directions for your personal photo project can be found on the blog for 

Thursday, April 9.

All graphic organizers are due on Thursday, April 23. Remember that your 

prezi or power point should only have only the image and a cutline, one to a slide.

What does it mean to look at a photograph? Photographs capture the image of a moment in time and space while also existing as a flat, cropped, and composed print. In this form, a photograph becomes a multifaceted art object that can inspire many meanings. When approaching a photograph in a gallery, you can start to unlock its attributes with three strategies for careful looking: description, formal analysis, and reflection.

Describe what you see: Describing an image is a useful technique for looking closely at the image and absorbing its details. Try to remain as objective as possible, discussing what can be seen without drawing conclusions about the photograph's meaning.A description can begin anywhere, but it is generally easiest to begin by discussing the subject matter.

Use formal analysis to identify characteristics

After looking carefully at an image and describing it objectively, the next step is formal analysis. Formal analysis relies upon the elements of composition (e.g., line, color, texture, balance, proportion, etc.). A good place to start is deciding which elements are most strongly represented.

Reflect on meaning

This final step should focus on the emotions and interpretations that an image evokes for the viewer. Different viewers will react to the same image in different ways, so there are no wrong responses. Knowing the historical context of an image can be very important for constructing reflective responses. 

Over the next two days we are looking at images, at which time you will have the opportunity to verbalize what you observe within the photographs what you observe in terms of composition and lighting.

Power Point: how to photograph anything

Lighting

Light conditions make or break a shot. Color, direction, and light quality are all important variables to consider. Here are a few techniques for getting the things right under tricky conditions.

Color of Light    The color of daylight, however, has a profound effect on the atmosphere of a photograph, and knowing how it affects the emotional content of an image enables you to control the mood.






Direction of Lighting

The direction of light in a photograph has a significant effect on color, form, texture, and depth in an image.


Side lighting comes from the left or right of a subject. Because it scrapes across from side to side, it creates a trail of intriguing large and small shadows. 



Light Quality

Soft light awakens worlds of subtle hue and gradation and provides a gentle but pleasant modeling in a landscape



You can't alter the quality of natural light in a setting , so it's good to match it to a compatible subject: hard light complements graphic lines, soft light is good for portraits.



Moonlight
You can photograph two types of moonscapes: those that feature the moon itself (both full moons and crescent moons are nice) in the frame and those that are simply landscape exposed by the light of the moon.

The best time to shoot landscapes that include the moon is shortly after the sun has set, just as the moon is rising.


Landscapes illuminated exclusively by the full moon but not including the moon can make eerie, ethereal pictures. 



Silhouettes
In photography, the simplest and most effective way to reveal a shape is by creating a silhouette. 

To create silhouettes, simply put an object in front of a bright background and expose for the background. 





It's important to remember that the subject be entirely surrounded by the bright background. 



Using the Flash 

Fill-In Flash

Although making dark places brighter is the primary use of flash, the next-best place to use it, surprisingly, is outdoors in bright sunlight. One of the problems of taking pictures—especially individual or group portraits—using midday sun is that the harsh lighting creates deep, distracting shadows. In people pictures, this usually means dark eye sockets and unattractive shadows under the nose and lips. Fill-in flash lightens these shadows to create more attractive portraits.