Carving Elephants
Nov. 8th, 2006 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumI had drill this past weekend, which afforded me the chance to do some action photography, because the training schedule had eight hours of "combatives" which is Army jargon for hand to hand combat.
The last time combatives were updated was in the late '70s. There were some interesting things in it, but as a practical method of real fighting, not so much. So it wasn't much practiced. Some guy in the Ranger Bn's decided this was a bad thing and got together with some UFC types and they started to bang out a set of moves. At the same time some other folks, around the army, started doing much the same.
So we now have a grappling style, based on Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and done with murderous intent. It's not uncommon for people to get injured in training. I have, at present, a couple of scratches on my forehead, and a sprained thumb. The former from a five minute bout with one person (in which I think I had the advantage, for most of the fight, and we travelled some 80 feet, as a rolling ball of arms and limbs, each trying to pin, and choke, the other into submission). The latter from not having a truly solid grip while trying to choke a different person.
I ache from my toes to my head, and have (four days later) a very stiff neck, from the same bout which led to the scrathes on my face.
The stiff neck meant I could, with easier justification, spend part of Sunday morning taking pictures of the training.
Which is where the issue of composition comes into it.
This took about two hours to put together, and I am lazy, I didn't resize the images. That would have meant opening them up, one at a time, in Photoshop, after I tweaked them, and converted them to .jpgs. I reccomend, that you set your browser to resize them, otherwise they may be too large to take in at a glance, and that's part of what this is about. If you want to look at details, you can, just open them to full size.
Because of that the rest of this is going
A picture says something. It may be as simple a tale as this is pretty
It may try to tell a story
Perhaps it is meant to evoke mood
It can also be abstract
But it has to be lean. The human eye works with the mind to glide past the extraneous, it elides things which distract, and captures the thing which interests us.
The camera is not so forgiving. Everything in front of the lens is taken in. Worse, for the photographer, it is compressed into one plane. Because of this, the eyes sees everything.
Composition is the art of carving elephants (How do you carve an elephant? Get a block of marble, and cut away everything that doesn't look like an elephant).
Happily, before one starts to carve, the marble has Heisenberg's Elephant, it can look any way one pleases.
In the studio composition is easier. One moves things about, sets the lights, uses a wire frame to see the image without the compression of the viewfinder (or the dimness of the ground-glass). In still lifes, with nature, one can, "garden" {i.e. remove those elements which are distracting e.g. the small tuft of dandelion which is bobbing in the forground).
But the non-essential must still be removed. That's part of Adams' "pre-visiualisation," being able to imagine what the scene will look like when flattened, and translated to a photo.
But what makes a good composition?
What the photographer likes. that's true, but a cop-out. There are rules, a body of "literature" which has been built up over millenia (because two-dimensional pictures predate photography, by a long pitch). Lines should lead to points of interest, or at least emphasize them.
In the example pictures which follow, I have made no crops. I've tweaked the top and bottom values, to make them easier to see (esp. in .jpg) but they are as the camera saw them)
This picture has two figures, and they are grappling.
Ok. Is there anything which makes it better than this one?
I think so. The second picture has a tight set of bodies, with a lot of empty space. Crop it, and there is action, maybe even drama, but floating in a sea of green, there's a lessened sense of connection.
The first picture on the other hand, is closer, more compact. It's not that there is fundamentally less of the lawn showing, but the people are larger, and seem closer. The background is also compressed (the lens was longer) and, here is the real difference, IMO, the yellow tape, and the concrete base of the tennis court reinforce the motion of the two of them, as the one pushes the other over. The gap where the boot leaves the grass makes it evident that the guy front is getting out from under/the upper hand.
Some of that was luck (the boot), some of it was planned (the longer lens) and some of it was a combination of the two (the lines). I couldn't know, when they started, what was going to happen in the background. I could (and did) make certain the 40 soldiers who were watching, weren't in the frame.
What about actual planning? Can we set up something (even using people) where the elements of form, repetition and alignment can be predicted well enough that we don't need the lucky moment of release?
Yes.
We pick the background. We choose the subject matter, and we look for the elements we want the picture to talk about.
What can we say about what was going on? If we were making an essay out of this set of pictures, how do we turn the anecdote, which is one picture, into a narrative?
We show scope,
and detail.
The first picture shows a circle of people, spread out on a bowling green. It make them take up a large part of the area, and shows they are out of doors, in a public place, a small part of the larger word. But we can't really see any of the other people in that world. T he people under the trees aren't all that apparent.
The second lets us see those people under the trees a little better.
That picture is weak, not because of the composition, but because of the light. The area to the right is washed out, there is practically nothing there. It's fixable, but I didn't want this to be an essay on repair, rather one on content. Look to the very right, there are a couple of people struggling on the lawn, so the circle of soldiers is complete. They make up an entirely closed image. At the edges are the old men, playing backgammon. They too make up a complete whole. They don't seem to care that people are grunting, and straining and actually engaged in a form of combat. That's composition, it tells a story.
We can also move in more closely, show the struggle of each of those pairs in detail.
Part of this piece is the plasticity of time. If you've ever been in a wrestling match, the time is eternal. Every effort is set to either trapping your opponent, or preventing him from doing the same.
By closing up to the point not all of the the two people in the shot can be seen, the narrow focus of their world is brought home to the viewer. By keeping the shutter open longer, some of the sense of trapped motion they are experiencing is also communicated. By keeping a small piece of the world true to itself (the straight lines of the buildig behind, and the small patch of grass in the foreground) the tension, the strain of what they are doing is offered up.
The last time combatives were updated was in the late '70s. There were some interesting things in it, but as a practical method of real fighting, not so much. So it wasn't much practiced. Some guy in the Ranger Bn's decided this was a bad thing and got together with some UFC types and they started to bang out a set of moves. At the same time some other folks, around the army, started doing much the same.
So we now have a grappling style, based on Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and done with murderous intent. It's not uncommon for people to get injured in training. I have, at present, a couple of scratches on my forehead, and a sprained thumb. The former from a five minute bout with one person (in which I think I had the advantage, for most of the fight, and we travelled some 80 feet, as a rolling ball of arms and limbs, each trying to pin, and choke, the other into submission). The latter from not having a truly solid grip while trying to choke a different person.
I ache from my toes to my head, and have (four days later) a very stiff neck, from the same bout which led to the scrathes on my face.
The stiff neck meant I could, with easier justification, spend part of Sunday morning taking pictures of the training.
Which is where the issue of composition comes into it.
This took about two hours to put together, and I am lazy, I didn't resize the images. That would have meant opening them up, one at a time, in Photoshop, after I tweaked them, and converted them to .jpgs. I reccomend, that you set your browser to resize them, otherwise they may be too large to take in at a glance, and that's part of what this is about. If you want to look at details, you can, just open them to full size.
Because of that the rest of this is going
A picture says something. It may be as simple a tale as this is pretty
It may try to tell a story
Perhaps it is meant to evoke mood
It can also be abstract
But it has to be lean. The human eye works with the mind to glide past the extraneous, it elides things which distract, and captures the thing which interests us.
The camera is not so forgiving. Everything in front of the lens is taken in. Worse, for the photographer, it is compressed into one plane. Because of this, the eyes sees everything.
Composition is the art of carving elephants (How do you carve an elephant? Get a block of marble, and cut away everything that doesn't look like an elephant).
Happily, before one starts to carve, the marble has Heisenberg's Elephant, it can look any way one pleases.
In the studio composition is easier. One moves things about, sets the lights, uses a wire frame to see the image without the compression of the viewfinder (or the dimness of the ground-glass). In still lifes, with nature, one can, "garden" {i.e. remove those elements which are distracting e.g. the small tuft of dandelion which is bobbing in the forground).
But the non-essential must still be removed. That's part of Adams' "pre-visiualisation," being able to imagine what the scene will look like when flattened, and translated to a photo.
But what makes a good composition?
What the photographer likes. that's true, but a cop-out. There are rules, a body of "literature" which has been built up over millenia (because two-dimensional pictures predate photography, by a long pitch). Lines should lead to points of interest, or at least emphasize them.
In the example pictures which follow, I have made no crops. I've tweaked the top and bottom values, to make them easier to see (esp. in .jpg) but they are as the camera saw them)
This picture has two figures, and they are grappling.
Ok. Is there anything which makes it better than this one?
I think so. The second picture has a tight set of bodies, with a lot of empty space. Crop it, and there is action, maybe even drama, but floating in a sea of green, there's a lessened sense of connection.
The first picture on the other hand, is closer, more compact. It's not that there is fundamentally less of the lawn showing, but the people are larger, and seem closer. The background is also compressed (the lens was longer) and, here is the real difference, IMO, the yellow tape, and the concrete base of the tennis court reinforce the motion of the two of them, as the one pushes the other over. The gap where the boot leaves the grass makes it evident that the guy front is getting out from under/the upper hand.
Some of that was luck (the boot), some of it was planned (the longer lens) and some of it was a combination of the two (the lines). I couldn't know, when they started, what was going to happen in the background. I could (and did) make certain the 40 soldiers who were watching, weren't in the frame.
What about actual planning? Can we set up something (even using people) where the elements of form, repetition and alignment can be predicted well enough that we don't need the lucky moment of release?
Yes.
We pick the background. We choose the subject matter, and we look for the elements we want the picture to talk about.
What can we say about what was going on? If we were making an essay out of this set of pictures, how do we turn the anecdote, which is one picture, into a narrative?
We show scope,
and detail.
The first picture shows a circle of people, spread out on a bowling green. It make them take up a large part of the area, and shows they are out of doors, in a public place, a small part of the larger word. But we can't really see any of the other people in that world. T he people under the trees aren't all that apparent.
The second lets us see those people under the trees a little better.
That picture is weak, not because of the composition, but because of the light. The area to the right is washed out, there is practically nothing there. It's fixable, but I didn't want this to be an essay on repair, rather one on content. Look to the very right, there are a couple of people struggling on the lawn, so the circle of soldiers is complete. They make up an entirely closed image. At the edges are the old men, playing backgammon. They too make up a complete whole. They don't seem to care that people are grunting, and straining and actually engaged in a form of combat. That's composition, it tells a story.
We can also move in more closely, show the struggle of each of those pairs in detail.
Part of this piece is the plasticity of time. If you've ever been in a wrestling match, the time is eternal. Every effort is set to either trapping your opponent, or preventing him from doing the same.
By closing up to the point not all of the the two people in the shot can be seen, the narrow focus of their world is brought home to the viewer. By keeping the shutter open longer, some of the sense of trapped motion they are experiencing is also communicated. By keeping a small piece of the world true to itself (the straight lines of the buildig behind, and the small patch of grass in the foreground) the tension, the strain of what they are doing is offered up.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 12:03 am (UTC)Anyway, the last couple of years I've been doing stuff with a Russian Leica-clone, the sort of gear that was fast when H C-B started using it in the 1930s, and seems almost slow and thoughtful today. And waving a Weston meter around does make you think about the light.
Anyway, first thoughts are too much light (or too high a film speed), and some problems with the brightness range. And that last picture has something.
The first two, I find myself thinking of a lower camera position, and getting the depth of field as shallow as possible. Possibly even focusing a little close. The idea would be to take out the detail on the background, keeping a sense of rectangularity, contrasting with the human figures. But I'm not sure it would be practical to get the angle.
I'm not sure about the second two of the combat pictures. If you're doing a sequence, they're establishing shots, but I don't get a sense of focus, of drawing my attention to any particular part of them. A part of it is the light, with the pattern of light and dark dominating the image too much. The second would be improved by a heavy crop, cutting out most of the bright area, but again I have this sense of a different angle. There's a line that seems to be in the 3D original that would have you looking through the spaces, framing the backgammon players with the soldiers.
But that's a different story being told.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 01:07 am (UTC)I think, as I decide what to say, I see part of the problem. I am not using this as a dissertation on how to shoot people. I am using people as tools in how to look at composition, mostly because I have a large number of shots, which allow for selection, so I could compare apples to apples (trying to discuss the compositional advantages/flaws of the bridge picture (which I ought to have been just a trifle higher in the frame for [though as I recall the picture, I was stuck with the lower shot, or including the distracting element of people, which I wasn't able to wait for any longer] to the elements of the runner not being tagged at second, struck me as hard to relate, one to the other, unless one already has the core idea of compostition down, in which case, what point the lecture?).
I appreciate there are flaws with the presented images; they are uncropped, and unedited. The blow-out in the one picture is horrendous, were I not trying to display the shape of it, I don't think it would be seen without a lot of tweaking (to pull the one side down, and the other up). There are some of the same problems with the two shots of the men in black shirts. 1030 is a lousy time to be in mixed light. The speed was 200.
TK
no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 01:25 am (UTC)The next picture doesn't show up at all in my browser.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 07:40 am (UTC)It's an interesting exercise in how viewers' impressions can be manipulated.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 03:50 pm (UTC)That's a subject for a different post.
TK