Take a number of shots using lines to create a sense of depth. Shooting with a wide- angle lens (zooming out) strengthens a diagonal line by giving it more length within the frame. The effect is dramatically accentuated if you choose a viewpoint close to the line.
Around the time Atget took the photograph above, two developments coincided to challenge illusionism in photography. Although simple hand-held Kodak cameras had been readily available since the late 1880s, it was the introduction of the 35mm Leica in 1924 that finally freed photographers from the restrictions of a large and cumbersome plate camera mounted on a tripod. And from recent developments in painting there came the sudden recognition of the photograph as a flat surface.
László Moholy-Nagy was a crucial figure for photography in the Bauhaus, the radical German school of art and design. By the time it closed in 1933, having been successively expelled from the cities of Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the Bauhaus had made an indelible stamp upon the future development of art, design and photography. It also became a ‘point of origin’ for art schools, including the OCA. László Moholy-Nagy encouraged his students to use the new 35mm camera technology together with a high viewpoint perpendicular to the subject to create pictures with a flat, abstract quality.
Now take a number of shots using lines to flatten the pictorial space. To avoid the effects of perspective, the sensor/film plane should be parallel to the subject and you may like to try a high viewpoint (i.e. looking down). Modern architecture offers strong lines and dynamic diagonals, and zooming in can help to create simpler, more abstract compositions.
Review your shots from both parts of Exercise 1.3. How do the different lines relate to the frame? There’s an important difference from the point exercises: a line can leave the frame. For perpendicular lines this doesn’t seem to disrupt the composition too much, but for perspective lines the eye travels quickly along the diagonal and straight out of the picture. It feels uncomfortable because the eye seems to have no way back into the picture except the point that it started from. So another ‘rule’ of photography is that ‘leading lines’ should lead somewhere within the frame.
My home, using lines of windows and doors to create depth.
Using a better angle to create even more depth
Here is my first attempt with this line of trees, I felt it wasn't giving enough depth so I tried again
Here there is a bit more depth, but I decided to change the line of trees I was shooting in order to find even more depth
this line of trees give even better depth, but I decided to shoot higher to find even more depth
using lines of the deck and shadows, shooting from above in a perpendicular way gives a flatten out vision.
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