With autumn here we are enjoying some spectacular colours,
and I hope you are getting opportunities to get out with your camera and
capture them.
Composition and Minimalism
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| Les Flynn's photo of a wall |
Any really good photograph makes
the viewer pause. Very often your
eye will linger on an image because it tells a story. And most often the story is told by the composition: what
elements have been included in the image, and how they are arranged.
And just as sometimes the
simplest stories are the most fascinating, so sometimes the simplest images are
the most compelling.
Minimalism is the approach that
capitalizes on the notion that “less is more.” It takes the approach of
“simplification” to the limit, eliminating almost all detail, stripping the
composition down to its most fundamental features.
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| Image by Heather Blish |
These kind of images exert powerful visual appeal; they have
very strong commercial value (lots of room for the publishers message), and yet despite of their apparent simplicity, they are not simple to create.
Go ahead – try to make a minimalist image. As always, you can submit one of these
in place of another assignment. If
you want a brief outline of exactly how to create a minimalist image, there is
a fine tutorial here.
Heather Blish (AKA “drawerist”) is a successful graphic
artist who works from her home designing websites, logos and print
graphics. Her minimalist
photography is a tribute to her fine eye for design, and underlies some of her
other graphic designs.
