Glowing Prairie Grasses, Horizontal View

My prairie grasses glow backlit in the late afternoon sun.  I grab the phone, step out the front door and frame the shot.

I love this glow.  Oh, how I love this glow, let me count the ways.

What I mean is, if I put the glow in the middle of the frame, the picture will die on me. When we say a picture is “dead” what we’re talking about is our attention.  When an image engages your attention it’s because the composition moves your eye through the frame and lights up your brain.

I can tell you how it lit up mine.

In my first shot I took a horizontal view because of the variety of diagonal lines formed by the A) crack in the cement, B) straight line of the wall, C) shadows of the grass and D) tree in the background. That’s nice because it’s the same element (diagonal lines) expressed by different shapes and reference.

The other compositional whammo is the Golden Section. This seems to be built into my retina, because here it is again.

In summary, we have three compositional dynamics working here.

• The horizontal frame establishes a tranquil, thoughtful mood.
• The diagonals, varied and upward moving, are restless, energetic and optimistic.
• The Golden Section anchors you in our aesthetic tradition.

How can this be a worthwhile image to look at?  It’s such an ordinary subject matter.  If you frame this — not cropped!– somebody coming to your house could make a face and say, are you kidding me?  What if you had it as an image filling your 50” TV screen!  Ha, look at that.

Consider the composition, pure and simple:

In the next post we’ll go vertical to see what can happen there.

 

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

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Walking in the Neighborhood

You’re walking in late afternoon when the shadows are very long. You notice that shadows can take strange, aggressive shapes on an expanse of lawn.  Click. In the picture the shadow looks even stranger than it did in reality.  Why is that?

Walk on. At an intersection you see shadows on the distant lawn. Click.

But you took a wide angle, getting the street into the frame of your camera.  It’s merely a documentation of this corner of an unremarkable street.

You raise your arms and you zoom in on the distant lawn.  Click.  Now you have an image of triangular shapes on a green surface with some rectangle in the upper part of the frame.  This is getting interesting. But you still have the street in there.

Now crop the reference to the street because it’s too much context, which makes the image point to something outside itself.

Why is this interesting?  Because now you have an image that can be seen two ways: one, as a reference to a green lawn with triangular shadows cast by neighboring buildings and two, as a pattern of geometrical forms that refer to nothing outside of themselves.

If you want to see this duality even more clearly, take out the color.

Now you have an arrangement of shapes that “does not stand for something outside itself.”  Is this art?  Hmmm, maybe.

On second look, yes.  Notice how the image has a unifying texture: the bricks of the wall have specks of black shadows that echo the specks of leaves on the lawn.  This unifying texture has nothing to do with what’s being represented.  “Art does not stand for something outside itself,” as Fairfield Porter would put it.

You can frame this, hang it on a wall, glance at it in passing and momentarily inhabit the realm of form, which is pure feeling.  Like music.

 

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

www.katherinehilden.com

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