Until I shot this picture, I always wondered why there was a hole clipped in the fence at the Chicago Avenue bridge, over the Kennedy Expressway. After I took a look at this image in histogram form, I began to understand why:
Here’s a capture of the processed histogram, in RGB:
Holy smokes! How beautiful is that?! It’s nice how the tonalities are evenly distributed throughout the histogram. It’s like my analogy of pizza crust. You want the dough to cover the bottom of the pan, using light to create emphasis. Do you see that spike at the right of the RGB histogram? That is the light glistening off the hoods of the cars, and the highway. I used a foreground light source, a Canon Speedlite 580exII. I set it to a very low setting, because I only needed enought light to create dimension on the wires of the fence.
I did NOT want the fence to be the focus of the entire shot, so to use so much light that the fence would be blown-out would have been a big mistake, unless you were shooting a “punk rock” picture, for a xerox flyer, or something of the sort. Too much contrast is not usually good, unless you are a punk rocker.
http://www.wetcanvas.com/Articles2/135/120/page3.php
Anyway, I now understand that there is a nice vantage point of the city, with good light twice a day, and a nice arrangement of cars and composition. Notice the gentle lilting curve of the traffic pattern. Johannes Vloothius, a landscape painter describes the s-shaped curve, and it’s use in photography of rivers, streams and ROADS, as allowing the viewer to “take a slow visual walk”… In this composition, it permits the viewer’s eye to push against the two-dimensional compositional convention of upper-left to lower-right:
It might not be immediately evident, but the combination of these compositional elements helps create depth, but also a pull, from lower-right, to upper-left. This is how the 2D plane can be used to hold people’s interest, and make them question, WHY? “Why am I looking at this image for so long, there must be something of social relevance here!” But actually, it’s that LR>UL pull. Try this when you need “stopping power”… Which is a must in advertising!
Comments are closed.