August Book Club, Week 3
Unique Properties of Photography, p. 84
"...reder detail..."
As Katie describes on the Book Club page, "Patterson differentiates between ornamentation (frills and extras) and design (intention in composition) and challenges us to simplify our images by questioning the necessity of what we have decided to include in the frame. Try to draw this distinction in your own photographs this week. Can you eliminate the ‘ornaments’ to focus purely on the design? Share what you changed when trying this approach (or even a ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparison). What did you eliminate and why?"
I have a Japanese antique stone lantern in my backyard. I photograph it every year, as part of a spring photo of the weeping cherry tree in bloom. It seems to complete the sense of a Japanese scene in my American backyard. For this exercise, I photographed the lantern in such detail that it focused only on the part where the light used to be placed, and not on the overall image. By doing this, and cropping out anything beyond the central square, the shape of the lantern that would be standing by the road and be recognizable was reduced to the very essence of what it was --- a place to put the light where it could show the way on a dark footpath.
Sigh, the only time I realize my camera is still set to European time is when I upload my photos. . .
