This is a page dedicated to challenging your ideas about photography and visual expression. Every week or two there will be a new challenge. You can use your phones to take photos for these challenges. You should create a place in your digital portfolio to display your work.
Everyone: Challenge # 1 : September elements of art
1 photo per element...
Using your phones or other device that records images, capture the following compositional ideas and post to your site. Due September 15.
Line: a mark with greater length than width. Line can be horizontal, vertical or diagonal; straight or curved; thick or thin.
Shape:a closed line. Shapes can be geometric, like squares and circles; or organic like free-form natural shapes. Shapes are FLAT and can express length and width.
Form: 3 dimensional shapes expressing length, width and depth. Balls, cylinders, boxes and pyramids are forms.
Space: is the area between and around objects. The space around objects is often called negative space. Negative space has shape. Space can also refer to the feeling of depth. Real space is three-dimensional; in visual art, when we create the feeling or illusion of depth, we call it space.
Colour: is the light reflected off of objects. Colour has three main characteristics: hue (the name of the colour, such as red, green, blue, etc.), value (how light or dark it is) and intensity (how bright or dull it is).
Texture: is the surface quality that can be seen and felt. Textures can be rough or smooth, soft or hard. Textures do not always feel the way they look; for example a drawing of a porcupine may look prickly, but if you touch the drawing, the paper is still smooth.
Challenge # 2: October Shoot like Herzog
Herzog taught himself photography as a young man in Germany, initially taking travel pictures and landscapes. Immigrating to Canada in 1952, he started shooting photographs of Vancouver streets as soon as he arrived in the city. In a time when serious photographers used strictly black-and-white film, Herzog’s photos were groundbreaking.
What also set his work apart was that often the passersby that were his subjects had no idea he was shooting them. Usually, he caught them anonymously and unawares, in the tumult of the everyday. One of the few shots where people ever posed for him was one of his most famous: the1962 photo Boys on Shed, with six kids sitting on the roof of a dilapidated garage behind one of the now-disappearing wooden houses of Old Vancouver, and two more standing beside it. However he exploded into the public consciousness when the VAG presented a huge retrospective of his colour photos from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s in 2007. Through digital technology, over 100 colour Kodachrome slides—selected from the roughly 80,000 photographs in Herzog’s personal archive—were turned into large, luminous prints for the show. “The Vancouver Art Gallery director, Kathleen Bartels, said to me, ‘You know, you became a rock star overnight,’ ” Herzog recalled to the Straight in a 2011 interview. “There’s a bit of truth to that. People came to it [the exhibit] and broke into tears because they recognized a city they had forgotten existed.” ~ The Georgia Straight, by Janet Smithon September 10th, 2019 at 4:01 PM
Task: Take photos like a street photographer
Over the course of the next 2 weeks, (by October 19) collect photos that show your attention to people in their environments. Take photos of people while they are busy doing other things, not posing. The value of this exercise is to become invisible as a photographer and pay attention to your environment; capture the interactions of other people without interfering.
At the end of two weeks, curate your photos and choose the best 5 to post to your portfolio under the heading: street photography.
Remember to EDIT your shots before posting them; crop, colour, exposure, black and white?, rule of thirds.
Challenge # 3 : November 25
Photograph a Truth
Photograph a lie.
Bonus Challenge Term 1: December
Create a playlist. Now listen to it while out taking pictures. Post at least 5 photos from the playlist session.