This exercise is about different ways to compose a photo using the gridlines feature in the viewfinder. My first task, therefore, was to find my gridlines! Im glad this exercise prompted me to do so as they’re very helpful for lining things up, although I don’t find them easy to see in some situations, depending on the colours and tones of my subject. Using the screen to compose a photo is an alternative option, where the larger size makes things clearer. My visual impairment does make seeing and using the settings on my camera more challenging, but I’m gradually finding ways to get around this. It just means I’m slower at mastering the features and techniques I can use.
Our task here was to take a good number of photos, composing each one in one section only within the grid. For example, I could compose a photo in the top left rectangle and not be concerned about what was going on in the rest of the frame.
I began by practicing at home, working systematically by focusing on a subject in each of the sections from top left to bottom right, and continued this sequential approach with the subjects I chose when I went out. Here are my contact sheets.
The first thing I noticed is that, composing images in this way, the subject I chose as my focus was often not what became the focus in practice. This is partly because I had my camera on auto throughout - I think in one of the exercises we were directed to set our cameras to auto and I hadn’t yet moved on from that. Had I taken photos in AV, for example, I may have been able to be more selective about the focus of each image.
Nevertheless, I felt that I could work with a good number of my photos and I put about 30 that I felt had potential into a separate album. I immediately discarded the indoor photos, partly because I didn’t like them, but also because they didn’t seem a good fit with the other images.
The images needed to work together because the objective of this exercise was to select 6 or 8 photos and present them as a narrative. The narrative didn’t have to be a story with a beginning, middle and end, but the images needed to hold together in a gestalt.
As I looked at my shortlist of images, I first wanted to collect a series in which there is a good cross-section of gridline compositions. I selected groups which had a point of focus in the top, middle and bottom thirds of the view. I began to see a narrative emerging about trees in Hillsborough Park. The following photos were two of my favourites.
I like the first because it shows a reflection of a tree. It was an indirect composition as I was actually focusing on the brick at the bottom left, but, in doing so, the tree reflection appeared in the top right of the frame. I doubt I would have made the composition exactly like this if I’d had in mind to focus on the tree, so this was a happy accident. The second image has a long view, framed through a leafy arch, and trees making up the majority of the foreground. The other views of this subject were quite successful too, and it was hard to choose, but in some of the others the view through the arch was out of focus, and in others the image was good but not as unusual.
From these two images I built my narrative. In top left I placed an image of the sign at one of the entrances to the park, in order to establish the location. I then chose photos from my shortlist which continued the theme of trees. In some of these the trees, branches and roots were the original focus, but mostly they’re not. However, as with the images above, composing within one section of the frame revealed compositions in the full frame that I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen. In many cases this resulted in images I wouldn’t use, but there were also some happy accidents, and much to learn about how to see and frame what is in front of me and my camera.
This technique would be interesting to revisit in AV, and also in other media such as drawing and collage.
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