assignment 5. channel your inner eggleston

reflection

This assignment pushed me to see rich possibilities in every aspect of an urban street. I got so immersed in taking photos that I was surprised to see that nearly three hours had passed. My hands and wrists were sore as I walked home, eager to download the images and see how they’d turned out.

After watching the video on Eggleston I was willing to try more — to capture ugly subjects, to break some of the rules of composition, to look at things from multiple angles and distances. I would not have learned as much about finding beauty in the mundane without watching the video before the shoot. Eggleston mentioned that he only takes one shot for each subject. I didn’t follow that approach because I don’t have the same level of technical experience, but I did use the assignment as a way to experiment with manual settings. In tricky situations like a backlit subject I took the same shot at multiple settings to learn how to achieve the best exposure. I also got practice in adjusting my ISO settings for different conditions — the open street, buildings in front of an overcast sky, doorways, or under the cover of scaffolding. 

I learned that symmetry and a straight-on perspective doesn’t always produce the most striking image. I often see things graphically in my head, which I want to translate to a flat image. Sometimes that works, but for many of the subjects I shot things got more interesting when I changed my position to be angled or uncentered. For example, now when I look at the image of the manhole cover with yellow spray paint and crosswalk lines, I wonder what that would look like from a low angle instead of looking straight down. Overall, I noticed that as the shoot progressed I took more photos, captured more variety, and had more good options to choose from, so I could see that I improved even within the shoot itself.

I came away with both aesthetic and technical lessons that I will apply to future projects. Aesthetically, I’ll work to approach shoots with the same sense of exploration and of looking at an environment with a close eye and open mind. I’ll also try to apply the lesson of angles and asymmetry in my compositions. On the technical side, I still need practice in adjusting the settings — and frustratingly in remembering to reset my ISO right away if I change it. I think I may be someone who needs the 10,000 hours approach to learning in order to get really good at the exposure triangle and having that knowledge be second nature. I have another three block stretch in mind where I’d like to do this assignment again, and I’ll be using it as well as future assignments to reinforce and refine these lessons.