Creative Photography - 3 Experiments To Have Fun With
Friday, March 26th, 2010 Subscribe To Our Feed
Though many people don’t realize it, photographs are a vastly flexible art medium. You should never feel limited to only taking pictures of the obvious or capturing reality as it stands. Just as with painting or sculpting, there is plenty of room to exert your influence on the way your photographs turn out. The same holds true with how you want to display your picture as there are countless types of picture frames from classic silver leaf picture frames to simple wood to exquisite jeweled picture frames that will influence your picture. So with so many ways to be creative, let's talk about several fun things you can do when taking your pictures that you may not normally consider.
1. Change Your Angle
One of the things that almost every photograph you’ve ever seen of your family or friends has in common is that it’s taken at the same height as your head. While it makes sense why most photos are taken at head level, it may not be the best angle for what you're trying to shoot.
Take a day and shoot pictures entirely from the ground or knee level and see how the different height will completely change your pictures. If you're feeling lucky, try taking a group of pictures from your waist without checking the focus or the frame and see what you get.
2. Push Your Film
All film has a recommended development time at any given temperature. For example, when developing 400 speed film in 70 degree chemicals, you would need to soak the film for 7 minutes before rinsing but don't take my word as you should check the recommended times off the developer manufacturers box. What many people may not realize is that the longer you allow the film to develop, the more stark the contrast gets. The darks get darker and the lights get lighter.
If you are lucky enough to develop your own film, try “pushing your film” or increasing the the development time by 2 or 3 minutes and see how it changes your print. While it’s certainly possible to push your film into an over-contrasty oblivion, a little extra push can sometimes create incredible results and help draw the important parts of your images out.
3. Set Your Camera to “B”
Any film (and most digital) cameras with manual settings will give you the choice to set your shutter speed to bulb or “B.”. Simply put, this setting will make your camera shutter stay open for as long as you have the button pressed and is a terrific way to capture some images you may not have thought possible. Sadly the bulb setting doesn’t do well in daylight since it will overexpose the frame, but in a dark environment there’s a lot of fun to be had with this option.
Place your camera on a tripod facing the night sky and leave your shutter open for 5 minutes (using a cable release) so you can capture the stars moving as the earth rotates. You can also hold the camera shutter open and have someone spin around holding a flashlight and then snap the flash and you'll have a shot of them encircled by light. This setting takes a lot of practice but can produce incredible results.
The next time the urge to shoot takes over, keep these fun suggestions in mind. You don’t need any additional equipment for most of them (besides a cable release, which you can pick up for a few bucks) and you can use almost any SLR or DSLR camera. Just remember that you should only experiment with pictures you're willing to lose. At the end of the day all that matters is that you have fun and create images that are beautiful, truthful, and important to you.
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