Lesson 1: Abstract

PaddyofNine

Ok so I've been looking at some of the online lessons at morguefile and I'm going to try and do one of the assignments myself every week. So I thought it's be no harm to throw a thread up here, see what you can all contribute!

For the first lesson, the homework is :

Assignment 1: Take at least one abstract photo based entirely on some of the compositional rules we talked about. Subjects should not be recognizable.

Assignment 2: Students will take pictures of a subject from various viewpoints (near, far, from above, below, behind). Creativity is encouraged. Likewise, post your best two or three photos of the subject online and send me a link, along with an explanation of which you think is most visually appealing and why.

I'm **** at abstract stuff so why not throw up your favourite abstract picture (if you've gotten one) and why... We'll see how it goes...

Fenster

ShakeyBlakey

fenster no insults intended, but thats not abstract, thats a very nice pic, but not abstract, in my view absract is when u see something and it takes u a while to actually figure out what it is, then when u realise u say ohh yea, it looks different out of the norm. nice pic, not abstract

PaddyofNine

Yeah, as the terms of the assignment state, it has to be an abstract photo that, while pleasing to the eye, must not be a recognisable subject. Nice pics though! Anyone else got any abstracts?

PopeBuckfastXVI

Here's one that I orignally posted for Calinas salt challenge

PaddyofNine

Hey that's pretty cool, Pope. Is that just salt thrown on a black felt cloth?

Anyway this has been driving me mad for the last day (more so since I don't have a camera for another month and need to rely on my phone camera!). I'm terrible at abstract stuff. Here's my shot, all of stuff in my house!

PaddyofNine

So has anyone else got any abstract photos they want to share?

PopeBuckfastXVI

Hey Paddy yours are pretty cool!

I basically let salt fall off one plate onto another in front of a black background, and shot it while it was falling

Dades

Paddy you have to explain what the stuff is now!

This abstract enough?

PaddyofNine

The theme of the assignment was an abstract image, using the concept of repitition.

Okay, so the black rectangular image is the hob on my gas cooker, flipped and cropped.

The blue wavy image is one of those jelly-airfresheners that I hate so much but my housemate likes, shot in close up, and in the negative mode on my camera.

Finally, the spirally photo (my favourite out of the bunch) is hard to explain. Last year at college our society collected loads of money for charity. The collection buckets from that morning are still in my gaff, and these are some of the lids, stacked on top of each other and shot down the vertical axis , again in negative mode. You can see the bits of plastic sticking out where we had to cut holes in the tops of the buckets...

Like I said, I've made myself a goal of following the assignments in the morguefile tutorials, one every week or so, college permitting. The abstract tutorial is first, and I found it way harder than I thought it'd be. It's hampered even more by the fact that my point-and-shoot got nicked a couple of months ago, and I'm getting a new dSLR (my first!) at the end of March so until then I'm having to make do with my camera phone, which is what these were taken off. I'm sure I could do more if I had a proper camera...