November 26, 2009

I said that I'd only keep one picture per day, and this is really only one picture. My brother-in-law said that I should post more analyses of the pictures, so I thought this was a good example of composition to talk about. The first picture is a christmas village scene that my Mother-in-law set up on a counter top at home. I used a narrow aperture setting of about f-stop 10 which means that the hole that the light enters was narrow and the focal length was long. A higher aperture setting means that you can get a longer depth of focus. I also tried using a wider aperture to get the look I was hoping for. The only problem was that the lens focused on a different spot than I was hoping for. In this scene I repositioned the chapel and and people and added a little red car that she won as a prize today. When I got home, I still thought that the picture was a little un-interesting, so I experimented with several different croppings to emphasize different parts of the picture.

With a little bit of luck, I came across this picture. Same picture, but a different part of the picture. The result looks almost like a different composition of characters and scenery. The focus is now on the man and the woman and child. Despite the fact the figurines are inexpensive plastic molds, one begins to notice details about them. Some questions arise, such as, what is the man holding? It looks like Christmas time. Is he going to give something to the little girl? Who are the little girl and woman? Is it her mother? Is it a delivery man? Or is he a philanthropist? Is that his car, and is he going to get into it and drive away when he is done?

You can see how the picture comes to life with a different composition or simply a different cropping. Obviously, if it both images are the same photo, both of them contain the same elements, but with a slight change in the focus, it makes drastic changes in the significance of the picture. This was a fun one to talk about, don't you think?