Thursday, May 03, 2007

Deliberately Flouting The Rules

I wrote about fun photography, but what about deliberately breaking the rules in your serious photography - normally shoot landscapes sharp from front to back - how about trying wide apertures and a small plane of focus for a change. Normally wait for the wind to die to get your shot, how about deliberately shooting in the gusts to record a living moving landscape?

If your norm is a full tonal range from black to white, maybe try some highly compressed tonal images, you never know, you might like it.

Odds are you won't get anything great, but if you are honest with yourself, you are lucky to get one good image in a hundred shots anyway, so just how much worse could this be?

See how many rules you can come up with that you might try breaking and let us know what it/they are through adding a comment.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not sure if this counts, but I have a few images that, for whatever reason, did not resonate the "soft" feeling I had hoped to convey with straight toning. So, I opted for a Photoshop effect mimicking what I used to do in the darkroom (I only recently learned it actually has a name: Orton Effect)

The effect involves combining a sharp image with a blurred image in either darken or multiply mode. I've only done this a handful of times as I'm more a fan of traditional toning, but it seemed to resonate with both me and those few images.

Anonymous said...

I also do very few silhouettes as I consider them a bit gimmicky and flat, but sometimes they're just what the doctor ordered.

Anonymous said...

Sorry for the pedantry but wouldn't the expression be "flouting the rules? I do enjoy the blog.

George Barr said...

By George, I think he has me...there.

Will change from flaunt to flout. Mea culpa.

ARConn said...

George, ruler are for people who don't know what they're doing.