The Unsung Details
We tend not to notice the things we see every day. They are there, and of course we are aware of them, but once they stop being new we stop paying them any attention. When we want to take pictures we need something interesting to shoot, so we go out to where all the interesting things are – or we bring interesting things into the house for examination on the still life table.
What most of us fail to appreciate is the abundance of exciting compositions already hanging around the house that we have stopped seeing. Every house has interesting corners, exciting lines and edges as well as places where the light forms in beautiful pools on floors and splashes on walls. Our houses are filled with shapes, angles and gracefully transitioning tones silently describing curved surfaces and raised textures – we just need to see them with new eyes and make the most of them.
I once set myself a project to take pictures within a mile of my house for a year. I didn’t live in what I thought was an inspiring place, but when I looked hard enough there were plenty of pictures to be had. And that time taught me to look harder in easier places for better pictures.
Now we are all confined to barracks for a while we can make the most of the time by working on our composition, framing and observation inside the house. If you take this project on the hard work will pay you back later as you’ll have a better appreciation of the elements that can make a picture interesting. This can be a period of learning and practicing the theory, so when the world returns to ‘normal’ we are in better shape to make the most of the visual delights of the great outdoors.
For this project I confined myself to the smallest room in the house to make the challenge more entertaining, and to prove anyone and any camera can do it I used the Lumix DC-GX880 with the standard kit zoom lens. The room has one (frosted) window that lets in beautifully diffused light, and it has lots of twists and turns as it used to be an outside loo.
The elements I was looking for in the room were places where the light was interesting, but also places with graphic appeal. Most of what I was looking at is architecture, so I paid attention to the levels on the back screen to keep everything straight. I then used the screen to make frames in frames, to divide the composition using edges and lines, and looked to see where I could get an unusual view.
It was a lot of fun actually, and made me appreciate that little room even more than I did already. I spend a lot of time looking for lines, light, shapes and graphic qualities in the street, so it was nice to be able to exercise the same eyes in a more confined space to create abstract images without having to move more than a few steps. I think the project sharpened my awareness for composition too, and I consider it an investment in my future photography. And it only took about fifteen minutes.
Now, let’s see what you can find in your living space. You might think there is nothing to shoot, but I bet the stairwell offers some interesting shapes, and the corner of the fridge may have a nice curve. Go look, shoot, shoot again and enter your pictures into our Unsung Details competition which will be launching next week. You have a head start!
Tips:
- Look for lines, shapes, repeated angles
- Find contrasting textures
- Using graphic edges to break up the frame
- Try different compositions and experiment with how you arrange the elements in the frame
- Keep it simple