Project 7: Visual Experimentation. Exercise 2: Viewpoint

This exercise on viewpoint is reminiscent of some of the photography exercises, but goes on to develop images into drawings. From a choice of themes I chose the word ‘holiday’. The task was to gather and arrange a few objects suggestive of the chosen word and photograph them from different angles, including from underneath. That last one was challenging as I couldn’t work out how to get underneath my items. In the end I taped up a picnic blanket around an alcove and arranged the items so that at least the hat could be seen from underneath if I held the camera near the floor.

Here are the contact sheets for my photos.

For my thumbnails I decided to use an elongated rectangle in contrast to the standard photo dimensions. This gave me the opportunity to try a range of compositions from taking a slice of a zoomed in photo to creating areas of space around or to the side of the chosen objects. 

Whilst most of the thumbnails were horizontal, I did create some vertical compositions. Because of the way I drew out my boxes these also appear to be horizontal. Where the sunglasses appear to be vertical, these are the thumbnails that should have a portrait orientation.

Of  these compositions I felt that the zoomed out images with empty areas were most successful at conveying the feeling of a summer holiday, being more suggestive of relaxation. The zoomed in images seem more busy and bogged down, in the way that we can be at work, and want to avoid when on holiday. However, I didn’t want my drawing to look like a still life, but more like a pile of possessions we might leave on a picnic blanket in a random rather than deliberately arranged way. Therefore I chose the bottom left thumbnail to inform my visual, as the frame to the left cuts through the objects, yet there is empty space beyond.

Here is the visual. I used different mark-making techniques to shade each type of item in order to differentiate them in what was a sketch rather than a fully developed image, as described in the exercise instructions. 

The process is a relatively quick and easy way to move from a range of possibilities to one chosen image. Changing viewpoints could be undertaken quickly with the camera, rather than needing to create a larger number of thumbnails. Looking at the body of photos, it was easier to evaluate which compositions were more successful than it was just by looking at the objects in three dimensions. This meant that the more time consuming step of drawing images could be targeted at the compositions which looked to have most potential.