Photo Breakdown

Edit: If you're interested here's a post on exploring movement in a similar vein.

Since this is the first one of this kind of post I would like contextualize it a bit.

I am currently attending one of the workshops held by the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) on Street Photography.

As part of that workshop Simon who runs them shows off the work of a bunch of street photographers, that I should really know by now, and so it's a nice little rounding off for me as a photographer. I could write more about these, but for now I think that much context would suffice.

Currently we were looking at the photography of Craig Whitehead (a.k.a. @sixstreetunder) to get inspired by him and learn from him.

I think more than anything it just got me shooting again after a bit of a dry spot and so I would like to actually share some photos here.

The photos are not really top notch quality - I wouldn't print them in a darkroom. But I think what is more interesting to share with someone just starting out is my process and approach to analyzing my photos.

For context, these photos took me a total of 4-5 hours of walking over 2 sessions. I think the constraint of presenting something to the workshop made me compromise, however what I kept wasn't off-cuts, they were picked from the material I managed to collect to be the best representatives.

And so, I will show you the set of photos I kept and a breakdown of in the spirit of a mini analysis.

Selects

Here are my "keepers" that I displayed at the workshop.

Note: If you intend to read the analysis bits below I would highly recommend to play the 'stare at it an analyze it yourself' game so we can compare notes.

Feeling

The things I am about to talk about are so ingrained in how I do things, that I don't notice them, I just see an photo that I shot and I know what the intention was, whether it was achieved and what kind of compromises are in the photo.

Good photos minimize the compromises.

Yes, "it's not the right angle", or yes "it's a bit too crowded here", but since I don't crop - it will have to do. Life is messy, it's your job to get good enough at taking photos to clean up the mess and deliver something deliberate and considered.

Also, I am the first one to see any issues in my photo and acknowledge them - you have to be honest with yourself. Learn that quick, otherwise it will slow down your growth.

Analysis #1

Looking at the first photo we see a lot of things going on.

Firstly, it's clearly intended to be a bit abstract or have a bit of confusion or complexity in it. I love a bit of melancholy through abstraction. This I consciously appreciated when standing in the scene.

Here is an annotated version of the photo we will be using.

There's a very clear split to me between the left hand side of the photo and the right hand side. You can see a dashed line going more or less vertically on the left. I am a big fan of a good split in an photo, in some of its dimension. People often say - "have some contrast in the photo" and I am pretty fond of light value contrast, as well as contrast through geometry in some form.

The left side seems like it's primarily middle gray and above in it's values, with dark values being the exception, while the right side is the complete opposite.

The split lets my brain feel a very clear distinction between the left and right sides and helps me balance the photo. The brighter left side, even though smaller, provides a counterweight to the right hand side which is predominantly dark and has a lot of weight of it's own.

This isn't something I was consciously aware of while I shot, but this sense of what I think is more or less tonally balanced is something I've just developed over time.

On the right, I am also very deliberately sub-framing and using the window frames as geometric elements. I don't mind the mess inside of these sub-frames in terms of textures, because it adds authenticity and it is very well bounded in the sub-frames.

If we look at the left side closer we can see some interesting bits happening. Firstly the right hand side darkness spills over in nice and pleasing organic patterns. I am sometimes a fan of hard cuts, like the one in the following photo from the selects.

But in an photo that has a bit of surrealism in it, having a cut like that would have completely changed the feeling of this photo.

Coming back to the left hand side in the photo, there is a bunch of noise that appears because of the buildings behind me. What you don't see here is that I spent quite a bit of time worried about the complexity that adds to the photo and tried positioning myself to block a good amount of it. So in this take my shoulder there, marked in blue stripes, is actually a functional element to cut out the noise of the street.

The thing I had to weight up when I looked at this photo is whether I can live with the amount of noise that is still present with the top of the building visible. Ultimately, I think it adds some context for your brain to figure out what is going on here and adds a bit more interest to the left side texturally to balance out the pretty busy right side. So it didn't end up being much of a compromise in my mind.

Moving on, the clear focal point of the photo is me standing very deliberately between the two organic circular shapes. The placement of me is very much intentional as it is fairly central (not exactly though) and it's a human form. It's hard for humans I think to not spot other humans.

This is again, very much deliberate and the optimization I was doing here was mostly positioning my camera just right to make my figure be evenly spaced between the two circular shapes. This is the kind of detail you want to push for when you're at the scene taking photos - keep adding intentionality in your compositions.

Then there are the organic connected circular motifs. I was clearly aware of the black knob and the oval shape to the left, but only in review I was able to see the one on the top right and the swirly-ish one on the chrome at the bottom. If I had seen the top right one while on location, I would have corrected it to be split right in the center by the lines crossing it. That split being off the center of that circle is a clear compromise for me, but it wasn't enough to sabotage the whole photo.

As a side not, I had another set of photos where actually I was trying to use the black spherical object to cover myself out of the photo and wait for a person walking by to be the subject, but the only good shot of an interesting enough subject I got was the following photo.

It clearly covers me well and actually has a better central split of the circle on the top right, but now we have 2 problems that kill it for me:

1. The fire extinguisher on the bottom left just is a massive distraction and too big of a compromise.

2. The left hand side split isn't as clean and interesting as it is in the selected take.

   In this one you are missing that split between the light values on the left and dark on the right which throws the photo off balance. Unacceptable compromise even though the persons expression is interesting and me being hidden away makes them the focus.

Anyway.

The curved beer tap at the bottom was very much seen and placed there to add a bit more brightness to the right side, balancing it out, as well as for it's knobs that were essential to the composition. It also helps contain the rhythmic pattern made by the bars at the bottom very nicely, which is also something I saw during the alignment of it all.

One emergent and fun thing I found afterwards while looking at my shots from the day was this fun emergent pattern produced by these white bits on the back wall.

Given the right hand side is so dark they seem to produce a nice starry night sky effect to my eye and then they compliment the stars on the top right, which is not something I was aiming for deliberately. I did see the spots on location, but didn't treat them as constellation adjacent, but rather as a bit of fun texture to help add interest to the seemingly darker areas of the right side of the photo. I like a bit of deliberate noise in my photos, particularly if it makes the photo look older.

That sums up the first photo, it's not an awesome photo in moment, but the composition was controlled and there weren't that many compromises made there. I think the reason I submitted it is more because of the abstractness of it all.

Analysis #2

For this shot it took me 30 or so minutes to get this shot (the discard pile is real). It wasn't a particularly challenging shot, definitely hard to nail if you're not doing digital but if you have a screen on the back of your camera you can 100% nail this. Just take your time.

The reason it took me a while, if you're curious, was because I needed the right combination of subject and lighting as the sun kept going in and out of the clouds.

Clearly the stars here in order are:

1. The floral stuff making this a bit more dream like
2. The person with the sunglasses standing in as a subject to add some moment
3. The tilt + leading lines to the right. Including the momentum the subject imparts
4. The texture of the glass

Right off the bat the first thing that I see as a compromise here is that the space at the bottom is a bit too roomy. If I had to guess tilting the camera up revealed too much of the shop behind me and that comes with a bunch of distracting text.

So the right call here would have been to maybe come in closer, to then try and tilt up. Given how much time I had to think about these things, while waiting for the right subject and light, I should have considered it a bit more.

If you are asking 'whats the problem with this arrangement', well it become really clear to me when you rotate this upside down.

To me it looks much more stable to me upside down, which kind of implies to me that the right way up version might be a bit unbalanced. What also makes more sense this way up is the darkness in the middle of the sunflower and how it feels more like a cave entrance now. If I had to guess the curve of the stem & the western writing system being left to right helps me read this as more stable. What is somewhat dubious this way up is the bright area at the bottom and the lack of clear subject. Anyway.

The bottom right corner has a distinct 'flavour' so let's have a look there next.

The sharpness of the petals there is because I experimented a bunch with the focus. I was considering if it should really be on the window/flowers or on the sidewalk where I was expecting a person to walk by. Not putting the focus on the person too much I think ultimately added a bit more abstractness and dreamlike quality so I went with that.

That said, I do shoot F16 80% of the time, which I think I did then as well, and that meant that it wasn't as massive a difference as something like F1.8.

So all in all this was very deliberate as a choice, but maybe not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things.

The emergent stem in this corner, which admittedly I saw later while skimming the shots on my laptop, doesn't really add too much to the photo but it's cool how it comes through the petals. The area of deep, deep darkness that, which I emphasised in the edit, is definitely important though.

I think photos that desire to be deeply dreamlike have this 'nowhere' quality about them. Part of the crushing of the dark values here is because of the need to remove any texture that might have been there. If dreamlike is the intent, texture might be sometimes distracting and sometimes it might give too many cues to the reader about the environment, which then peels off some of the dreamlike quality. When is it distracting and when is it not will have to be judged on case by case basis, but those calls become easier to make when you are actively thinking about this trade off.

The bigger picture is that these deep dark blacks tend to create this sense of nothingness and of the abyss. It helps add at least an emotional layer behind the fairly mid range tonal values elsewhere for me.

The other fairly eye catching part of the photo is the writing.

What I like about it is that it adds this magazine quality to the photo. It adds a bit of LIFE magazine. I think clearly it's one Levenshtein Distance unit away from being The Ritz which would be a nice stand-in for some form of commentary on luxury. The original word I believe was Spirits if you are curious.

The petals behind the writing has to me a big of a rightwards pointing nature. It's thinner on the right and so it looks like it points to the right which nicely agrees with the rest of the photo.

Finally in around the text we start to see, in the mid tones, this glass texture that gives a bit more abstraction and a bit more interest to the photo. I really like that texture and I'm sure the photo wouldn't be the same without it.

Moving on to the middle portion, this is where we clearly see our sunglassed focal point. They are in mid-stride with a perfect upside down V shape being created by their legs. I think that imparts a lot of movement in the rightward direction to the photo. The tilt of the camera together with the leading lines of the pavement here create a rightward momentum for me in the photo.

This is reinforced by the petals behind the writing and the ever growing size of the rhythmically laid out posters.

The other fun thing is that there are some organic shapes, both below and around the person. The blurred petals of the flower behind the glass clearly creates a pleasing hood for the persons head to sit in, which was actually very deliberate. I have quite a few shots where the persons head and legs were off which obviously was too much of a compromise to call it anywhere near decent.

Ultimately the photo is cool, but I think the big compromise of the balance being off between the top and the bottom of the photo for me seems to downgrade the photo in the grand scheme of things. I should go back there and try to get a better shot.

Analysis #3

I decided to leave this one for last because it's a double but also because I think it kind of only works as a double. Only together do these photos make something worth looking at for me.

Yes the dog photo is kind melancholic and abstract, but it also compromises heavily on the balance, it has a big chunk of black at the bottom and the composition just seems off. While the other photo of the person walking by is cool because of all the lines, but it's kind of a 'person walks by' photo.

Admittedly, I kind of love the creepy dog soaked in melancholy somehow on it's own even with the above compromises.

Clearly these 2 photos have the dark vs light thing going for them. Similar to the one discussed in Analysis #1. You have the 'predominantly light with a bit of dark tones' vs 'predominantly darkness with a bit of context peeking out as high tones'.

But more than anything the reason they work is that they have:

1. A similar flow about them in the direction of their diagonals
2. An implied line of sight between the dog and the person on the left.

I think let's start by looking at the diagonals.

The diagonals are top right to bottom left in terms of direction. The direction of stare for the dog makes this clear for me - dog looks AT something - and not the other way round, which implies that the diagonal is coming right to left.

What is also clear is that the lines don't completely add up. It's an odd mix where they are close enough for my brain to say 'ok that's not too bad' (compromise?) and 'my god do they pivot!'. The one line that really holds this tension up is the bottom most blue line. It might be hard to see it, but the side of the step from the photo on the right flows into the dark line on the car window leaving your brain seemingly implying a sort of cohesion that the other misaligned arrows are working against.

I already mentioned the line of sight of the dog. Let's cover the two subjects of the photos.

The dog is looking at the person. That is one read of the photo but if you stare enough at the dog you realise that that relationship isn't implied by line of sight in my view, it's kind of assumed by my brain. I believe the dog is looking a bit downwards - not exactly at the person in the other photo. So the implied line of sight is what your brain thinks is happening being reinforced by the strong diagonals of the bright step. Only me?

Clearly the subjects are inverted in the two halves. Dark tones in a light setting vs light tones in a dark one. Finally the person on the left also has their reflection making a 90 degree angle parallel the pavement, which adds quite a bit of intentionality to the photo that I can admit wasn't completely fully formed as an idea while I shot, but having some form of reflection was definitely part of the plan. I do like that both the dog and the person and their shadow have a distinct almost sharp shape to them which adds something.

One thing to highlight here actually is that the dog photo has again a ton of crushed dark values again, it's nothing revolutionary but it definitely adds to the abstract nature of how it feels as you can't really see the pavement or any other details.

Lastly this corner also is worth having a bit of a look at.

What's not so good about it is actually that the shop contents actually add quite a bit of visual noise to the top left of the crop. However, I think having it all clean like a purgatory light might make the photo read a bit different. Either way, as it is now it's a bit of a compromise I think, it's not clear what needed to be there for me to feel differently about it, but it is what it is.

The SAVE text is a really nice touch, maybe making some implications about the dog's status and if it's lost?

The right corner on the other hand has PLAY NOW but it's placement is a bit too close to the edge which makes it get cropped where the blue line indicates the edge. Redeemingly it has a circle with text vs square with text juxtaposition across the two sides of the dog so you can forgive it being a tad cut off.

Finally, I can admit that this photo was from the hip and hence I can't really say a lot about it's intentionality without it being contrived. Sometimes things work and I don't ask questions.

The last compromise relating to this corner is the top right corner which actually isn't that bad, but I think that the bubble in the corner is something I could have done without. At the very least it is more or less quartered, letting you maybe assume some intentionality. And maybe even without it you'd have too much black there.

Overall it's an OK pair. I don't think that this pair together is that fabulous, but I do think that as a set of two they work better than individual photos.

Wrap Up

I hope this was fun and/or educational. Either way feel free to ping me on instagram at @definitely.artful and tell me your thoughts.

Again, this is actually photos that would be drowned in my catalogue, but given I was taking photos and going through mini cycles of curation and editing down as part of these workshops, I thought it would be good timing and material to use to start doing this type of exercise.

I would have loved to have something like this when I started and that's good enough reason for me.

- Art