Breaking the rules or 40 minutes to create a photo

Photography is made up of rules. You follow the rules and you will generally have a very good photo but as they say, rules are meant to be broken and knowing how, why and when to break those rules can turn a good photo into a great photo.

Probably the most famous example is Arnold Newman’s photo of Igor Stravinsky, sitting at a piano, though you will see this in many of his images.

Of course, the important thing is to know why the rules can be broken and that means knowing how to play around with composition and make your subject stand out in that space. Arnold Newman was a master of this using space to his advantage and being able to get the viewer to find the subject, both in a busy image or relatively sparse one.

So, I was sitting around the office, with about 40 minutes to spare and 3 thoughts entered my head.

1. I can’t face learning Light Blue today.
2. I need to write a new blog post.
3. Can I still take a good photo?

That 3rd one is a regular occurrence.

So, I popped to the office and set up the camera and lighting. Now I had done a similar image a few weeks earlier, which was the closing image of my selfie photography project, with me holding a knife (there is a story behind the image but I will leave that for another post).

Now, the original idea was to have me sitting upright in a seat, holding a camera, with me being in the bottom right of the image but I couldn’t get the image to work and the clock was ticking down. So I quickly changed the setup, moving my chair further back, so I was leaning forward and having my arm and hand go up to my chin.

There were several, reasons I did the things I did. I did try on a couple of different tops but went back to my black top for this photo because it gave out a distinct frame from the background and allowed my arm to stand out in the image. I deliberately pulled up the sleeve got the top, so my arm would be showing (whilst leaving the other sleeve down to make sure there were no more lines than there needed to be).

I leaned forward because, it left less noticeable wrinkles on the top and allowed me to rest my arm on my leg.

The arm, is very much like an arrow, taking the viewers gaze to my face, which is where the viewer should finally focus their gaze. Now, I am not completely breaking the rules with this image. I am still on the right hand 3rd third, though only on 1 line (I couldn’t have tried to get myself to fit into the bottom right third line or extended the image in post but in this case it didn’t feel needed.

Lighting was pretty simple 2. my beauty dish, 45 front left, and 2 strip boxes right, with a silver reflector coming in from the right side to just soften the shadow slightly.

Of course, I didn’t get to edit the image properly in that 40 minutes but in the 5 minutes I had left, did do a basic edit, where I decided that the image would be black & white (the image worked in colour as well but I am a sucker for black and white).

This finished image, took a little bit longer to edit but not dramatically long.

So there you have it. 40 minute to create a photo, which broke some of the rules but very much followed the rules.