Changing the Point of Focus
I came upon this awesome photography tutorial by Expressive Photography by Alister Benn. In his video "The best (and fastest) way to master composition" And learned a new way of looking and approaching composition.
I was curious to see if we could also apply photography to paintings and experiment with the painting by an 18th-century French artist who is known for his still life and Genre paintings.
The painting we’ll be looking at is:
"Soap Bubbles" by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
Keep the cool stuff and eliminate the uncool.
Alister mentioned something really interesting about what composition is. Since in photography, a lot of the scenes are already “composed” When taking pictures, you aren’t starting from scratch since you already have the scene or landscape you want to picture. But despite that as a creator we want to be able to compose our composition by using the materials we already have.
A key thing to keep in mind about composition is:
Compositing means “Making a point” Either you want to tell a story to the viewer or let the viewer know what you want them to focus on while they look at a particular painting.
So by “Keeping the cool stuff and eliminating the uncool stuff” We are taking control of what we want to tell our viewers to pay attention to and convey the story we want to share and tell them by choosing how our composition is going to be placed.
Re-composing and existing painting.
That’s why here today, I decided to play around and see if I can “recreate and recompose the composition for an existing painting. I chose "Soap Bubbles" by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. And see what other possible compositions we can create using this one painting.
#1 composition
Here’s the first composition I decided to make by cropping off the extra things we see in this painting. (The leave at the top and bottom). By doing this a few things happened:
Our point of focus has zoomed in more on the main character (which is the boy blowing the bubbles.) Compared to the old painting, the point of focus included more of the secondary subjects,
But once you crop off the extra space, the placement of the figure changes, and our golden ratio line is aligning with a new point of focus.
#2 composition
Let’s see what happens if we decided to focuse on our supporting chacter, Boy #2:
Our point of focus has zoomed in more on the supporting character, which is this fellow here in the shadows.
He’s now in alignment with the golden ratio so we tend to focus on the placement of the characters.
But at the same time, I also kept a bit of the boy blowing the bubble, because we need some kind of connection for our supporting character to gaze at with such curiosity. So keeping the bubble, hands, and part of the face of the main character helped us fill in the information we needed for the story to continue flowing.
#3 composition
Now let’s try and focus on something completely different, Let’s give the spotlight to the cup of bubbles shall we:
Now our point of focus is on the cup of bubble water. Having it placed and aligned with the golden ratio, we’re focusing on what this mysterious cup has to offer.
The only thing about this composition is that it’s lacking in context and information. We are very confused about “What’s in this cup.” Is it milk? or “is it something else?” Could be the person’s drink… maybe.
Also because of how the painting is cropped off, we have a hard time noticing that the arm is an arm of our character. It’s missing too much important information that it makes it confusing for us and makes us “guess” than just seeing what’s most obvious.
Mini Exercise for you!
Pick one of your favorite pictures or artwork and painting and try to “recompose” the composition, like how we did today with Chardin’s painting. Play around and see the different possibilities of changing the point of focus in an existing painting or picture. See if you can take the lead and have control over what you want to tell and show the viewers.
Have fun!
What did you discover?
I’m curious to see what your thoughts are on changing the point of focus in a composition. If you also discovered something new,I would love to know! (You can comment and share your thoughts below!)
Thank you for reading my fun little discovery and I hope you also get to learn and share your discoveries too!
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PS Feel free to watch my new YouTube video about this new post! Sharing thoughts and ideas!