The brief for this piece on our first day of Lens Based Media was to spend 40 minutes drawing an image we had brought in before cropping it in various different ways to show how this can effect a picture.
I decided to draw this image of me and my friend Connie at an event in the O2 for which we had taken a rest whilst another friend there with us had snapped a Polaroid. I love to draw people and this is why I chose to recreate this image in pencil and charcoal. I used the charcoal to create areas of tone that I wasn't able to do with the pencil; the pencil being used to add delicate lines to construct the image with more intimate detail around the face, hands and hair.
The first crop I created was one that removed the top of the head on the left and brought in the edges of the image. This made the interaction between the two people more intimate as it took away the negative space surrounding them and forced the viewer to just focus on their interactions. By just showing person A's lips, the image is almost viewed from friend B's perspective and creates the illusion that there may be something more than friendship on the cards for the other person whilst they are oblivious to that fact. This wasn't what I was aiming for when I positioned the crop but it seemed to appear this way after looking at it and it made me realise how removing certain areas of an image is able to completely change its perception.
The second crop I experimented with was one that in which I didn't alter the height of the image, but simply cropped the edges closer. Although the centre of the image is largely empty and this is an an unusual arrangement for any photo, I thought it represented the closeness of the friendship presented in the image. Being part of a conversation means that your focus isn't on much other than the other person you are conversing with and I tried to portray this by cropping out the detail on either side of each person. Of course this isn't the conventional way to crop an image and there's a reason for that as it means that large amounts of this drawings detail are excluded from view. It also means that the gaze of the viewer is dragged around the image in a confusing number of ways instead of being drawn straight to the centre of the piece which doesn't make it stand out as much.
I enjoyed this exercise, not only because I could spend a good 40 minutes drawing, but also because I was able to experiment with something I had never even considered before. It enlightened me towards how professionals have to carefully consider the composition of their image before they even take the photo and increased my admiration for how much work really goes into this form of art. I must say, before I began the Lens Based Media pathway I thought that all there was to it was taking pictures and sticking them on a wall, but this experience has allowed me to appreciate the forethought and afterthought as well as editing, lighting and planning that goes into this medium.
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