[MUSIC] Responding to photographs, is one of the most important activities photographers engage in. Not only do they learn how others see their work, they also get a chance to hear what others think their works say, or mean, or reveal. Over time, it can add questions to those the photographer asks herself, and open up new insights into how the photographs might be seen. It can also illuminate how the photographs get the view thinking, and what they get the viewer thinking about. Asking these three questions, in this order, goes a long way to creating the most productive interchange between photographer, work, and viewers. What techniques were used? What visual elements make up the photograph? How did the elements work together, and how is the image composed? When we respond to photographs, either our own or those of others, we can either remember how we made the work, or we can imagine how someone else made the work. To start off, hold off on assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the result. Push yourself to begin by describing the subject. Describe the techniques used. As you remember them, or as you imagine somebody else might've used them. Describe important elements of design and how those elements work within the organization or composition of the whole. So in the first phase, we can look at what you could call camera work. We can look at what aspects of the photograph relate to how the photograph relate to how the photograph was taken. Exposure. This image shows desired Level of exposure on the left, and to the right you see two other kinds of exposure. The one in the middle is highly underexposed, and the one on the right overexposed. Depth of filed, here you see on the left an image that has a shallow depth of field. To the right you see an image that has a very broad depth of field. Almost everything Is in the sharpest possible focus. Here you see, two different approaches to light. The one on the left uses only natural light and even then a very bright, ambient light. The one the right uses an on camera flash to supplement the lighting that was in the space, and you can see that the flash is actually incorporated into the design of the image. In this image, you can see the role played by ISO and in particular, this is an image which if you were to blow it up, you would notice has a great deal of graininess, and all kinds of color artifacts, particularly on the right side of the image because it was taken with a very high ISO. Another aspect that you can look at in this phase of responding to photographs has to do with the vantage point. Focus Notice in the photograph on the left of the foreground is very sharp and then focused, and the image on the right is actually very much out of focus although it seems almost there framing, and it's framing within the frame of the image itself the degree of blur if any. Found in the image or the degree of sharpness in a image which tries to stop the motion of a moving object. Finally we get to a different kind of camera blur. On the left side you see a Actually, it's a compound blur that's created by shooting through a colored glass window into a bar, and in the middle, there's another kind of deliberate blur, and in this case, it's created by a different kind of camera. This was taken with a pinhole camera, and the image on the right, again, has two different kinds of blur and actually several Sharply in-focus parts and that's actually shot through the window of a care in the rain, at night. Next, we can look at the aspect of the photograph most often referred to with the term, composition. We can look at how the elements of the photograph are put together into a whole. Form has to do with the overall configuration created by the elements. You can also in the photograph pay attention to whether it's dealing with a kind of dominant feature, or a particularly striking detail. You can also pay attention to symmetrical or asymmetrical configurations within the photograph. Tone is a special kind of category. There are lots of ways to establish tone, and we'll be talking about several of them later on in other parts of the course. Here you see another aspect that's very important in looking at composition. Generally referred to with the terms line and shape. Similar kinds of things hold true for vertical or horizontal lines that pass through the image, wither from corner or from the sides or the top or the bottom. Finally, there's a familiar term, and it's a very important term used within photography, and determines perspective. Negative space is a crucial category. In each of these images you see it. Another aspect of composition is texture. Another aspect of composition has to do with point of view. Another aspect of composition is pattern, and in the final phase of responding to photographs, we can look at the subject matter, the content, the concepts, and the meaning, and as before, important terms can guide our response and questions. We can discern that they have a kind of documentary function, either to show a place or people or a time. Sometimes they could be historical, taken from a time period beyond what we remember or even before we were born, and in some cases, they may document important events or important people, or other times they might simply document. Everyday life, this kind of photograph is sometimes referred to as allegorical it has to do with weather the photograph seems to evoke some kind of story or some kind of sense that the image itself is connected to a story that somebody knows or to a plot structure, or a dramatic structure that somebody knows. Portrait is a very common category of photographs and a complex category. Perhaps one of the most complex in all of photography. Since it refers to so many different kinds of projects. Still life is another category which has been used many, many different ways, many, many different times. This category has to do with Whether the photograph seems to be a suggestion of a concept that can't literally be stated in a photograph, but that perhaps is evoke by it. The view more or less had to figure out what they think might be suggested by the combination of elements within the image. Another category is often called experimental, and sometimes that refers to the results, and sometimes it refers to the process used to create the photograph. Finally, another category similar to portraits in the A sense that it's a very broad category. There are many, many, many different kinds of landscape and many ways of approaching it. It seems to have been almost an inexhaustible source of inspiration for photographers to try and create pieces that could be called landscapes. As you can see, there are a number of categories that have to do with each of these. Camerawork, composition, and concept. All photographers deal with these categories and there are many, many different approaches, and when you're responding to photographs it's very helpful to go through these categories, and as I said, to start off by trying to not get so much into whether you like or dislike the image or whether you think it's good, or bad which really may or may not be all that helpful to think about, but more importantly, you need to start off by noticing things and trying to hold off thinking about what it might mean, or what the larger form might be, what the larger scale of questions might be, and to pay attention to detail. Look at relationships in a sense to do a kind of inventory of what's there before you start trying to figure out what the meaning of what's there might be. [MUSIC]
