PBase

Back to Basics Informal Meet-up
Repeat after me: “I will not be a lazy photographer.”
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AN EASY ONE THIS TIME, FOLKS.

There’s a quote in photography attributed to photojournalist Robert Capa:
“If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

A lot of the time, that’s good advice. But we are breaking rules again. There are times when you need to step back and give the subject room to breathe.

Put simply, negative space is the area which surrounds the main subject in your photo (the main subject is known as the "positive space"). Negative space defines and emphasizes the main subject of a photo, drawing your eye to it. It provides "breathing room", giving your eyes somewhere to rest and preventing your image from appearing too cluttered with "stuff". All of this adds up to a more engaging composition.

When used properly, negative space provides a natural balance against the positive space in a scene. Getting this balance right is tricky and rather subjective, but it's something you'll get better at with time and practice.

Suggestion:
Our brains are full of preconceived ideas about the way objects look, in terms of their size, shape, color, texture, and so on. Unfortunately these preconceptions distort the way we view a scene, and this can lead to photos which look good in our mind but not so good in reality.

The key to overcoming these problems is to ignore the objects in the scene altogether and instead concentrate on the gaps between and around them. This forces you to pay more attention to your composition, and helps you see shapes and sizes more accurately.

For some nice examples of negative space, click on this link - http://photographybutterfly.com/2012/11 ... egatively/

Your assignment:

Take and post one or two photos showing and using Negative Space.

If you would like to discuss your experience, please do. We can learn from it.

Our goal is to get our best shot through the camera and not the computer, so please limit the amount of processing. For this challenge, you may rotate your image on the computer. If you shoot in raw, of course you may adjust your photos as necessary.

Commenting - lets try to give support to one another and point out what we like about the resulting photo(s).

If you have criticism, keep it constructive and hide the comment.

Deadline to post for this assignment is Saturday, November 8th.

Shot at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA. This is the Webb farmhouse.

I am not in any sense of the word an "artist." Many people would agree with that. When I looked at the examples in the piece that Lynn posted, I only found one that I liked. For several of them the only thing that came to my mind was "crappy cropping job." Then I got to thinking (always dangerous, just ask my wife) about the idea that the negative space can be the subject. Well, then it wouldn't be negative space any more, would it? But I had some fun. Why else would we take photographs?



John

Today, on Pbase, I saw an example of Negative Space that I really like.

http://www.pbase.com/sushislee/image/158035816

Click on the image for my discussion

John

Negative Space... I'm going to try to do a better one before the challenge is over tomorrow.

Here is my entry. I almost always shoot in raw, but my wife was learning to use this camera and she does not have raw conversion software at the moment, so it was still set for jpeg when I shot birds in the local swamp. It is amazing how much difference there is between the two formats when it comes to post processing. This image was only straightened and sharpened a small amount.

LynnH said one more entry was OK.



John