Narrative and Illustration

This part of the course focuses on the subject in our imagery.  Up until now on this course a lot of my focus has been on creating attractive and pleasing pictures.  I suppose this is not just down to the exercises I had to complete but also down to the fact that I was learning a lot more about using my camera and the best way to get the effects I wanted.  


I have dabbled a little with focusing on the subject when I experimented with street photography but felt that I didn't torn between making the picture pleasing but also interesting from a contextual point of view.  


This section of the course will enable to direct my attention to the subject.


In the introduction to this section I have been asked to find two photographs from magazines/newspapers to find the most contrasting examples of subject and treatment. In one of the images the subject should be of little importance but the image making skills paramount.  The other images should have the opposite qualities where the subject is important and the image handling unremarkable.  These images will mark the ends of the tug of war scale between the subject and its treatment or between content and form.  

This image of sardines on a bbq was taken from a website and it what I would call graphically pleasing.  The lighting is enhanced by the flames from the bbq and the horizontal and vertical lines make for a good composition.  However, there is no story to be found only form.  

On the contrary, this image is from a news website for a story about the Olympic Games.  Mo Farah is a big contender for a gold medal in the long distance running.  The image is all about his previous success, he is smiling, with the British flag held behind his back.  This picture is not particularly well balanced one of his arms has been cropped out of the shot. The crowd in the background is barely visible.  He is smiling but this is for the cameras in front of him.  It is posed and looks like a snapshot. 

This part of the course is going to challenge me to take pictures of my subject whilst showing what is important about it, and why it is interesting instead of on the grounds of it being simply graphically attractive.