The Curious Creative: Week 6

Photography Scavenger Hunt

This is the sixth exercise of The Curious Creative, weekly 10-minute writing exercises for the busy individual interested in exploring his creativity. For the complete rationale, click here.

My Thoughts:

Composition is the placement or arrangement of ingredients in a work of art. In writing, it involves decisions about what content to include and how to organize and order it. In photography, it involves what to include in the image and where to place the subject in relation to the viewer. I love dabbling in different art forms to help me understand how a principle works in writing. Therefore, this week, we will play with composition in photography.

Your Turn! 

Poet Walt Whitman kept a writer's notebook in which he wrote down specific 1-2 sentence notes about things he saw: “Where burial coaches enter the arched gates of a cemetery” and “Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees.” Instead of a writer's notebook, "jot down" pictures. Photograph anything that catches your eye: various objects and creatures around your house, yard, street, neighborhood. Try not to be too judgmental in your choice of subjects: a tiny bug well observed, an object you've had for years, an old pair of shoes that should have been thrown out long ago, the bit of dying shrubbery outside your window, dust particles suspended in a ray of light, etc.

Complete this Scavenger Hunt of photographs taken:

1.        Take an overall photo of an object, such as a building. Then take six-to-twelve detail pictures of the same subject. 

2.        Look up and take a picture of something above your head.

3.        Look down and take a picture of something below your knees.

4.        Tilt the camera and take a picture of something from underneath.

5.        Tilt the camera and take a picture of something from above.

6.        Take a picture holding the camera at a tilted angle.

7.        Fill the frame with the subject of the photograph (example, of an entire person, feet to head)

8.        Take a two-third cropped picture of the subject (example, just above the person’s knee).

9.        Take a one-third cropped picture of a person (example, chest and up). 

10.           Frame the subject with a doorway, archway, window, between two trees, etc.

Which ones are your favorites? Why? More importantly, how did you feel as you walked around and took photographs from different perspectives?

To encourage each other and grow a community of Curious Creatives, sign in from a google account, so you can share your creation in the comment boxes below. This week, post your favorite photograph. Also, if you subscribe to this blog (submit your email address in the "Follow this Site by Email" box on the right), you will get an email update whenever a new exercise is added. Thanks for playing!

The scavenger list is adapted from “Learn to Take Better Photographs” by Susan Caplan Macarthy https://suite101.com/a/ learn-to-take-better-photographs-a142953