Assignment 5: Taking Pictures without Your Camera

This week assignment from list extracted from Harold Davis article series Becoming a More Creative Photographer, is the fifth assignment, or taking pictures without your camera.

Your assignment: Without a camera, observe a scene closely. What abstract pattern or patterns can the scene be boiled down to visually?

Staring up, light pours in trough the window softly fading away. The ceiling beams gently guide it through the room space. I am trying to think what are the basic visual patterns in which I could decompose the scene. Maybe the first one would be the window acting as the vanishing point for the main beam and the angled ceiling. It looks pretty simple as a visual construct. However, if I had to choose one abstract pattern that remains consistent and powers the image across the scene, that pattern would be line repetition. It starts on the window. Repeating lines define it. Beam lines emanate from it. They define the basic resting guidelines for the parallel and perpendicular lines to rest and repeat. Even when the scene gets abruptly interrupted, the guiding and recursively repeating lines emerge again with slanted generative angles. In case you wonder, yes, I just took the camera after I finished the assignment so you could see what I was staring at :)