Assignments

Each issue we'll devise an activity or assignment to provide some practice in an aspect of photography related to the feature article. We have two such activities here—seemingly simple, but offering very practical training for those who are serious.

Assignment #1: Go through your slides, prints or inventory of digital images from the last few months and select any where you could have done a better job of isolating your subject. Look at a minimum of a hundred images—that's just three rolls of film; if you are really serious you'll examine many more. Keep a tally on the worksheet. [Download the PDF worksheet and instructions.]
      Then take another look at the most common kinds of problems (bright objects near an edge, too much depth of field, etc.) and note for at least a dozen specific images what you might have done differently to isolate your subject.

Objective: This activity is designed to get you to look at your previous work critically. If you know what to look for (what is a distracting flaw), you are more likely to take steps to avoid those same mistakes in the future. Your own photographs are likely to be your best teacher.

Assignment #2: The second assignment has three parts: We'll ask you to reshoot one of the subjects you identified as flawed in the first assignment, then we ask you to take a candid portrait, and finally shoot a subject in a complex setting like a street scene or a messy garage. [Download the PDF worksheet for this portion of the assignment.]

Objective: The purpose here is to provide some practice in isolating difficult subjects.

Conclusion: We hope you will experiment with these activities several times, not just once as though you were simply trying to complete an assignment. The more aware you become of potentially distracting objects and bright areas, and the more practiced you get at using the techniques available, the more accomplished your images will become. We realize you can do some of this in Photoshop—that's not exactly cheating because those are worthwhile skills to develop—but you ought to eliminate the distracting elements in your viewfinder, and only then use Photoshop to tweak things.

                                                                                                    —FLG

If you would like to submit any of your images to the editors of this website, we'll select a few that illustrate the concept. One of our editors will probably make some comment--and we'll set up a means to enable others to do so as well on our Forums page (coming in a later issue).

No. 2 Jun 2006

 Photography is not simply a craft
   or art, but a means of seeing and
    thinking about our world.

Examples for the assignment:

I wanted to show a horse in its urban corral but the plastic thing to the left was impossible to deal with. I moved right and left to no avail; a longer lens would have isolated the horse, but at the cost of omitting the very context that made the image worth shooting. Sometimes there's nothing you can do but move on.