4th Assignment - Office Art Critique

While up here in Half Moon Bay I went online and noticed I'd received the critique on Office Art. I did not like this assignment. I have trouble with setting shots up.

I'll be leaving Half Moon Bay where I've been for the last 5 days to head over to my sponsor's house in Concord, CA to attend her Baby Meeting on the Concepts. Tomorrow I return to the LA area and will be at my Home Group Meeting Thursday night and Ray! Can't wait. I've had a great time up here photographing Half Moon Bay but it's time to return home to Ray and my regular routine. I'll be posting some of my favorites I shot this last week in a day or two.

1. CRITIQUE: Linda Jeffers
Office Art
CALLING CARDS

Good idea for a photo -- lots of photos
of YOU! I like how you have them all
fanned out, and how you've created a
repeating pattern, not only of yourself,
but with all the words and letters and
the individual cards. You've effectively
pushed our eyes around the frame,
checking everything out. Well done. I
also like your limited depth of field.
There's just one "Gottago" that's in
focus while the rest blur out. It's a very
good technique -- shallow depth of
field so that everything's soft except for one little thing, or one little "slice" of a shot.
Your exposure, focus, composition -- all are good.
The only thing I'm wondering about is the bit of
background showing in the lower left corner. Is it a
distraction? Your picture's all about repeating
patterns, repeating words, repeating forms. To have
something completely different and unrelated lower
left could be a distraction. But, frankly, it's not a big
one. I just needed SOMETHING to talk about! :-)

2. BODIE TYPEWRITER

This is interesting -- both you AND Bruce Lloyd
submitted pictures of old typewriters. (I'm
wondering if we've got any "feet on old typewriters"
waiting in the wings! There have been more feet in
this class than I've ever seen!) Look at the difference
between your old clunker and Bruce's old clunker.
His had boldness because of the red/black/silver
color combination. Yours has boldness because of
the strong stairstep forms you captured.
Let me talk about that a minute. Look at the three
triangles you put together in this shot. You've got one up top with the typebars, another formed by the "wedge" of keys, and then a third formed in the lower left
corner. Everywhere we have triangles we have diagonal lines (and perhaps everywhere we have diagonal lines we have triangles).
Wherever we have diagonal lines, we have movement. And you've got a lot of movement here.
I like the dust and weathered metal -- they create an ambience that really adds to the concept of
your photo. Naturally, I wish it were sharper, but I
understand the problems we have when shooting
through glass, especially at Bodie. So all in all, I think
you did really well with this shot -- especially with the
composition.

3. TRASH CAN

You had a lot of decisions to make when setting up this
shot. What do you put it on? What do you use as a
background? How do you keep the reflections from the
metal non-distracting (i.e., how do you keep YOU out of
the reflection?). And then, how do you crop this? Do
you include the entire trash can? Or do you (as you did
here) decide to clip off one side of it? Set-ups can be
difficult, and this is a good example.
Overall, I think you did a good job with it, especially
with the exposure and with the reflections. There's
nothing being reflected that catches our eye and makes
us dwell on the reflection rather than the shape of the
trash can. And your background is clean and simple.
You put the trash can on a glass table that creates a
mirror-like reflection, which I think is very effective, a
very interesting touch.
You clipped off part of the right side. Does that look
like an artistic decision, or does it seem like an accident?
To me, it seems kind of accidental. Usually, when we
chop off something, we need to make it a really radical
chop (like in half) or we need to chop off something on
the other side. If we don't, we run the risk of appearing
careless with our photography.
So then the question is, if we're going to amputate, how
far should we go? Or would it have been better not to
have amputated at all? I think perhaps if you’d been able
to include the entire trash can in the shot, it would have
been better. We could have seen the form better and
we’d be less uncomfortable about part of it being
chopped off. Maybe a wadded up piece of paper at the
bottom somewhere would be a good touch to give a sense of size/perspective.
Thanks for posting these. We're just three hours away from getting together here in Half Moon Bay -- I should have done this in person!
Carol Leigh