Freeman Patterson Workshop

Exercise 2: Pictures from your own back yard.

2005-08-04T23:09:00.000-06:00

The assignment here was as follows:

Part 1: Have someone (other than yourself) choose three seemingly unrelated items/objects for you to photograph together. Don't expect masterpieces, expect a struggle. Minimum requirement: 20 pictures.

Part 2: Pick up your camera, a 35-50mm lens, and your tripod, and go to the front (or back) door of your home. Take 19 steps. Mark the spot. Take seven more steps from that point. The seven steps from your original 19 mark the radius of a circle, in which you should shoot at least 20 images. You should feel desperation during the exercise. You will only start to make visual break throughs when you have run out of the obvious picture possibilities.

I skipped part 1 for the moment because I was home alone. But I just bought a Canon 2xII extender and was wanting to try it out. So I threw it in front of my 70-200 2.8 and then zoomed all the way out to 200mm and tried to find anything I could within about a 7 foot radius that was worthy of a picture.

Here are some of the images I found. Most of them are "within" the radius (with a couple of obvious exceptions where I stood within the radius but shot outside the radius).

Breaking the Rules: #2 Main subject is in focus

2005-07-31T22:03:00.000-06:00

Purposely focused the camera on the foreground subject even though the person in the background was my real intent.

I decided to give this rule another shot. This time it is the background that is out of focus instead of the foreground. And the focus, this time, is locked on some leaves that are just in front of the "bored looking guy" sitting all alone at the table.

Breaking the Rules: #2 Main subject is in focus

2005-07-27T21:47:00.000-06:00

Purposely focused the camera on the background subject.

The idea here was that even though the girl was the main subject, I wanted to see the expression on her boyfriend's face as he looked at her.

So while the girl dominates the scene and the direction of the boy's eyes guide us towards her, she is, nevertheless, out of focus and slightly darker.

Lighting used: Bracket mounted 550EX flash set to a 1:2 lighting ratio with a 420EX slave shooting through an umbrella.

Lens: 70-200 2.8 'L' lens, at 105mm and f/2.8.

Breaking the Rules: #1 Hold the camera steady

2005-07-25T12:51:00.000-06:00

Handheld long exposure, purposely rotated during exposure

In this picture, I was handholding the camera, shooting at a slow shutter speed (0.8 seconds) and rotating the camera as I took the shoot. The point was to purposely blur the image, hopefully leading to an artistic "abstract" of the flowers I was shooting.

Hello...

2005-07-25T12:09:00.000-06:00

Hello, my name is David Terry. I will be participating in the Freeman Patterson Workshop Group over at dpchallenge.com and am using this blog as a means to keep track of the images that I post for this workgroup.