Category Archives: Project Exercises

If photography is an event then looking at photography should also be an event. Look again at Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photograph Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare in Part Three. Is there a single element in the image that you could say is the pivotal ‘point’ to which the eye returns again and again? What information does thisContinue reading “Exercise 5.3: Looking at photography”

Brief Select an image by any photographer of your choice and take a photograph in response to it. You can respond in any way you like to the whole image or to just a part of it, but you must make explicit in your notes what it is that you’re responding to. – For thisContinue reading “Exercise 5.2: Homage”

Brief Use your camera as a measuring device. This doesn’t refer to the distance scale on the focus ring. Rather, find a subject that you have an empathy with and take a sequence of shots to ‘explore the distance between you’. Add the sequence to your learning log, indicating which is your ‘select’ – yourContinue reading “Exercise 5.1: The distance between us”

Capture ‘the beauty of artificial light’ in a short sequence of shots (‘beauty’ is, of course, a subjective term). The correct white balance setting will be important; this can get tricky –but interesting – if there are mixed light sources of different colour temperatures in the same shot. You can shoot indoors or outside butContinue reading “Exercise 4.2: Artificial Light”

Make a Google Images search for ‘landscape’, ‘portrait’, or any ordinary subject such as ‘apple’ or ‘sunset’. Add a screengrab of a representative page to your learning log and note down the similarities you find between the images. Now take a number of your own photographs of the same subject.Add a final image to yourContinue reading “Exercise 4.4: Personal Voice”

Use a combination of quality, contrast, direction and colour to light an object in order to reveal its form. For this exercise we recommend that you choose a natural or organic object such as an egg, stone, vegetable or plant, or the human face or body, rather than a man-made object. Man-made or cultural artefactsContinue reading “Exercise 4.3: Egg or Stone”

Find a good viewpoint, perhaps fairly high up (an upstairs window might do) where you can see a wide view or panorama. Start by looking at the things closest to you in the foreground. Then pay attention to the details in the middle distance and, finally, the things towards the horizon. Now try and seeContinue reading “Exercise 3.3 “What matters is to look””