Assignment 1 Feedback/Review

Having received feedback from my tutor on the Assignment 1 (the theory and practice of contrasts) photographs, I can now see the deficiencies in many of the compositions I submitted. The tutor critique is an incredibly helpful part of this course and I have reviewed my submissions in the light of the feedback received.

There was a general comment about my images being 'purely illustrative' rather than being framed with a bit more imagination to get the sense of the attributes (my words!).

My reflections on the feedback are as follows.

Hard / Soft - For the two images - the rock face and the soft grasses - I needed to give some indication of scale. Perhaps a bird flying or a boat on the water in front of the rock face, for example, would have been better.

Rounded / Diagonal - In response to the suggestion that I should try the Photoshop perspective crop tool (what an amazing thing!) on the 'Diagonal' shot to correct some of the backward leaning verticals, I have revised the original shot as shown below. The revised shot is more tightly cropped using the perspective crop tool but there are still some unresolved issues with vertical lines. However, I feel this works better although I miss the red window in the original!

Large / Small - my tutor felt that the left hand shrubbery of the 'Large' shot let it down and that the tree lessened a dynamic image. I had taken a shot using a different camera angle (shown below) and this seems to work better and is s cleaner image.

Liquid / Solid - the shot of the fountain which illustrates 'Liquid' doesn't really work. As pointed out to me, it is shot too close, it contains too many different elements and the parasol in the background keeps drawing the eye. I should have seen this for myself and the more I look at this shot the more I dislike it!

I had cropped the shot of the ice-flow which illustrated 'Solid' but had been too harsh, giving the appearance of being too close to the subject. The uncropped photo was much better, with the benefit of hindsight, and this is shown below.

Black / White - my tutor commented on the many possibilities afforded by the black bench with regard to 'close-ups, sections and an array of viewing positions'. Unfortunately, I didn't pursue any of them and settled for the 'safe' shot (as opposed to the more adventurous shot of the white bench which illustrates 'white'. Next time!

Many / Few - the doorknocker shot for 'Few' was slightly overexposed and a re-processed shot is below.

Straight / Curved - one of the things I have to sort out is getting my verticals vertical! The shot of the Bahía Sur railway station suffered from my verticals being all over the place (not for the first time) and, as pointed out to me, I had included a lot of figures cut in half at the waist. I have made corrections to address these points in the revised shot below.

This assignment and the feedback have been very helpful and I intend to learn from the experience.