For my photos this week, I wanted to avoid relying on representing movement through motion blur, and focus on movement of the eye around the image. To me, this photo has a lot of movement because there is a lot of line, and a lot of things for the eye to look at, even though the depth of focus is very shallow. Personally, my eye never really settles while looking at this image. It is constantly moving. Even when I try to settle, it's hard to resist moving to another part of the photo.
For my other two photos, I wanted to focus on movement as the result of eyeline. In this photo, all of the subjects are on relatively the same plane, so they are all about equally in focus. As such, I am able to feel my eyes being pulled around the image, at each person and where they are looking (which is for the most part, at each other). They form a very wide triangle that is nearly a straight line, but the shape still comes through because of the powerful draw of the movement of their eyelines.
This photo also uses eyeline for movement. However, there is a significant amount less movement in this photo because of the depth of the space and the shallow depth of field. There might have been more movement if the subject in the back was the one in focus, since the subject closer to us is taking up so much space that we may have looked at her anyway. However, as it is, the eyeline is still a powerful draw for us to want to see what she is looking at, motivating movement through either deeper focus or a cut.
Jeff, I really appreciate your avoidance of motion blur for this assignment! (I totally just used motion blur... haha). But it's true that there is more than that to movement, and I think you did that pretty intelligently here. Your first photo does have a nice sense of line, although motion isn't the first things that jumps out at me when first looking at it. But the eye moves for sure. The second photo I think has the most non-stop motion. I really do just jump from person to person, so that worked great. I agree with you about how a deep d.o.f. on the last photo would make the eye-line more powerful, but the line still reads and makes us move. However, I get really drawn to the bright blue screen in the background pretty heavily. Nixing that would have helped.
ReplyDeleteAwesome work man. I always feel like you really think about things a little more than I do, and it makes me want to spend more time really conceptualizing what I do on my work. :)