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The Monday Morning Memo

Photography Lesson
Hendrickson Garden, Wizards Tower, North Side.
(Like Wizzo said, Shapes and Colors do matter. A little.) 

The goal of this lesson is merely to sensitize you to the choices you have available when aiming a camera. 

We’re going to look at 4 different photos of this garden made from more or less the same angle of view just moments apart from one another. There is something to be said for all 4 photographs. Therefore, I will say it.

A person could argue that one of these is “better” than the others, but I am not that person. Like I said, there is something to be said for all of them. 

This first photo reveals classical “good composition.” Notice how the shot is framed so that there is something to see along all the edges:
1. The yellow flowers in the upper left corner extend slightly beyond the framelines, pulling the eye and the imagination with them.
2. Likewise, the cactus, the 2 windows and the cedar tree fill the upper part of the frame, refusing to be ignored.
3. A little bronze girl reading a book and a large bowl of cactus intrude from beyond the right frameline, telling you there would be more to see if only you were there.
4. A heavy, curved stone wall with a bit of rock garden revealed below it anchor the lower frameline.

This is an example of what photographers mean when they say “fill the frame.” Basically, they’re telling you to move a little closer so that some of your favorite stuff is bisected by the edges of the photo – partly revealed, partly hidden beyond the field of view. The eye and the imagination LOVE this.
 

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Random Quote:

“The other danger of rich people was their dogs. Poor people in my experience have mean dogs and know it. Rich people have mean dogs and refuse to believe it. There were thousands of dogs in those days, too, inhabiting every property – big dogs, grumpy dogs, stupid dogs, tiny nippy irritating little dogs that you positively ached to turn into a kind of living hacky-sack, dogs that wanted to smell you, dogs that wanted to sit on you, dogs that barked at everything that moved.

And then there was Dewey. Dewey was a black labrador, owned by a family on Terrace Drive called the Haldemans. Dewey was about the size of a black bear and hated me. With any other human being he was just a big slobbery bundle of softness. But Dewey wanted me dead for reasons he declined to make clear and I don’t believe actually knew himself…

It took me ages to creep, breath held, up the Haldemans’ front walk and up the five wide, wooden, creak-ready steps of their front porch and very, very gently set the paper down on the mat, knowing that at the moment of contact I would hear from some place close by but unseen a low, dark, threatening growl that would continue until I had withdrawn with respectful backward bows. Occasionally – just often enough to leave me permanently scarred and unnerved – Dewey would lunge, barking viciously, and I had to fly across the yard whimpering, hands held protectively over my butt, leap on my bike and pedal wildly away, crashing into fire hydrants and lamp posts and generally sustaining far worse injuries than if I had just let Dewey hold me down and gnaw on me a bit.”

- Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

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