ASSIGNMENT 6 - COMPOSITION

Reflection

I was travelling this week in NH so I would have ideally spent more time on this assignment but I spend some time doing a photo shoot with a covered bridge in a small town in NH which you'll see is the basis for a lot of my photos this week. Some of these composition types I found quite straight forward -- rule of thirds, fill the frame, symmetry are ones that I've employed a lot in my previous photography -- but others were definitely more challenging and required me to think more. I particularly struggled with isolation as I wasn't entirely clear what that entailed. I understood it mainly to mean capturing something dark or silhouetted against a plain or light background. This may actually be only one form of isolation but that's the one I went with when I saw the crew boats going down the Charles River in the setting sun. I think it turned out quite nicely although perhaps the background needed to be just water, without the treeline, for it to be true isolation.

Some of these photos are ok, my favorites are fill the frame, leading lines and viewpoint. I particularly like the leading lines image on the bridge because I find my eyes follow the direction of the bridge until they see the man standing looking over the bridge out at the view. When I took the photo, I actually didn't see him there but it creates a nice effect. That being said, I think I could have been much more creative with the different composition types. I'm not particularly keen on my framing picture as the exposure was awful. Being on a dark bridge trying to draw attention to the mill wheel in the sunlight created the extreme contrasts. I did increase the exposure a bit in Lightroom to try to lighten the wooden beams, but if I had more time, I would have tried to find a better framing image. It is also a very uncreative way of framing.

Moving forward, I'd like to spend more time practicing these different composition types and being creative with ones like framing and leading lines. I think if I practice more then my eye will be trained to spot them. I actually found myself seeing these elements more frequently after the assignment - particularly leading lines and framing. 

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This is also my first assignment using a portfolio website. I've chosen Wix but to be honest, I'm not a fan and it feels like quite a clunky, slow website builder. It also removed some of my Lightroom editing when I uploaded DNG images so I had to convert them to JPGs to maintain those adjustments. As I spend more time curating my portfolio, I may try switching to another website platform, or at least spending more time on the aesthetics of this on Wix.