Visual Exercises

I know it’s a bit pathetic to kind of re-do images, but this isn’t quite that.  When I was teaching photography, one of the exercises I would give my students, usually before they really had a chance to make photographs of their own, was to pick out a photograph (or two, or three) and try to see how many different images within that one image they could find.  That exercise helps to think about things like framing, composition, what to include in and outside of images.  It doesn’t work for all photographs, but when it works well, it’s a fantastic exercise.  Well, Ann and I had our own little visual exercise this week.

I figured that these photographs would be a bit better (read: more interesting) than the ones from our latest photographic efforts.  You see, they were photographs of Bill’s office that Ann and I made last weekend.  Almost 6 hours of photographing on Saturday and a few more hours of processing on Sunday.

These photographs are part of the same overall effort.  As part of getting ready to retire, Ann is transitioning (or at least trying to) the folks she has been providing technical support to for life after Ann.  One of those things is designing a much simpler and easier to manage Law Office of Bill Kloos PC website.

That’s what last weekend’s photography was for - photograph images of the law office so people who are coming to the office can see which side of the building to enter and what the office looks like.

Our effort this weekend was to cobble up some homepage banner images.  Where the exercise came in was that the banner is roughly a 3:1 ratio, which is significantly more linear than what I’m used to photographing at.  I really had only 2 images that came close to that ratio that I’d originally cropped.  So that meant quickly filtering through images to see if I could find within them, images at 3:1.  And the final image had to be horizontal.

Normally, a DSLR image is at a 3:2 ratio (horizontal at h:v), or a 2:3 ratio (vertical).  And while going from 3:2 to 3:1 may not sound like much, it is.  It drastically changes the composition of the image and, if you’ve composed and framed it at another ratio, there is no guarantee that the image will “work” at the other ratio

So these are some of the images I came up with; some made it to the website, others didn’t.  It was a fun exercise given that I went to the catalog that I’d imported high quality JPGs from my lightroom years and just cropped from there.  Well, for most of the images.

Some of the images I’d never finalized the processing (they were color flagged red or yellow instead of green) because I hadn’t decided they were worth developing.  At least until I realized they worked with a very strong crop.  Those images I did develop in Capture One.

I did realize an interesting thing though.  I generally did not have a terribly difficult time finding 3:1 ratio images from much of my older work when I was shooting at roughly the 3:2 ratio (many had been cropped to 5x7).  I even have several of the 3:1 horizontal images cropped from the vertical 2:3 images.  But what I discovered was that very few of my square images worked well with a 3:1 crop.  I say very few, but I didn’t select a single one to work on.  The compositions were so reliant on using  multiple corners of the frame that they just didn’t work as linear images.  So I have no real images from 2018 in there.  I’ll have to think about that a bit more to really be able to explain why. 

Anyway, here they are.  If you’ve been following the blog for awhile, you’ll be familiar with many of them.  Oh yeah, and they pretty much had to be of Oregon as well (I cheat at one point and use some images from the Klamath NWR that straddles the border - my tripod might have been 50’ on the California side of the line.  I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.).  I hope you enjoyed them.

Of course, I couldn’t not include an abstract image among the mix!