Workshop Experience : Photography Studies College Week #5
Busy busy week this week. Kicked in with an extra stream of a 3 hour/night weekly session that will last for 8 weeks, focussing solely on Composition and Creativity. So its twice a week for September and October we go !
We continued our original stream in the Lightroom digital lab, going deeper into Black and White points, tonal adjustments, and some more detailed catalog techniques. All good refresh stuff and you always pick up some new and helpful tips as you go over ground again. The one thing about LR and catalog techniques is that you can always improve !
We also presented our 3 images that were to show our Awareness Walk - 2 images of perspective and 1 exploring textures. I must say I struggled to interpret even this fairly basic exercise well enough and got lost in the execution a bit... but its all a learning experience and thats what we do workshops for, so onwards and upwards we go.
Awareness Walk Lygon St Carlton, Leica Q, ISO400, 1/250, f3.2,
Our tutor for the additional stream is Lucia Rossi and if the first session is anything to go by, we are all going to be in for a fun and creatively wild ride. Lucia got us from the start talking about Artfulness vs Art, and how we actually clarify what Art is.
Cy Twombly, "The Italians", 1960
We then set about understanding how you go about deconstructing an image (to the point that you wouldn't normally do it to every image you see!). The categories we used to "analyse a frame" are around Form (covering Medium, Style, Design) and Content (covering Literal meaning, Symbolic, and overall Metaphoric).
We practised on a Sandy Skoglund image "Radioactive Cats" which was great and I will not fill out the categories here as there are plenty of interpretative papers on the net exploring this work if you want to follow it up. Needless to say it was great exercise in deconstructing an image that has impact and multiple levels of subjectivity.
Lucia urged us to keep a log and a visual diary of image and ideas that inspire us from now, and that we would then analyse and discuss in the class as we go along. The next 7 weeks will focus one week each on the areas of The Frame, Frameworks, Colour, Shape and Form, Tone and Value, Rhythm and Movement, and Space and the Picture Frame.
Off we go again, this time down the creative and composition path!