Bridging the Gap: Classical Art Designed for Photographers | Adam Marelli

so just to give you a quick background on why this is going to be the way that it is my background is in sculpture and photography so I got two parallel education at the same school and notice that one was much better than the other that there were a lot of useful art and design lessons that are never really presented for photographers so that's where I'm coming from that's why we're starting with a drawing and not a photograph just so that we're going to start at the design basics so that we can understand the language and move through a body of work in painting and in photography we're going to look at some examples by other photographers and painters and then we'll finish with some of my own work so that you can see that I actually use this stuff and this is not fluff and nonsense in it you can do it and like David mentioned I teach this in workshops and I do that because I believe it's possible I don't really I don't like to rest on the idea that people are just born artists and that's it they wake up in the morning and they make brilliant work I think it's nonsense if we look at every artist every photographer at their beginning stages they stumbled and they made mistakes some of them learn a little more quickly than others but there is a lot of information that can be absorbed and applied regardless of what your subject matter is I don't you know how many people in this room have an arts background went to art school photography and whose entrance into image making is just in photography okay so we're sort of a smaller percentage in in the art we're going to try and bridge those two and to start off one example that I like to give us at the moment I'm learning Italian I'm about two years in and I sound probably like a four five year old to a native Italian speaker now to somebody who doesn't speak Italian it sounds as if I know what I'm talking about but to somebody who does it's kind of a travesty the reason is I'm still learning the structure of the language and the grammar and when we talk about the visual language from artists and photographers and I'll use those terms almost interchangeably we're talking about this art making is essentially a mark making tradition and it starts with five marks the top row we have a point a vertical line horizontal line a diagonal and curved or an arc now the thing to keep in mind is that only two of those things actually exist in nature there are points spots on everything stars in the sky you can go out and find them curves take a walk in the woods good luck finding a straight line they don't exist everything is curved in nature the straight lines in the middle are used by artists because it allows them to organize information and it's a complete hallucination if you look at a human face and see straight lines it's because you've learned to see them they're not there there's not a straight line on anybody's face but it allows us to organize information for photography in this case it's going to be inside the frame and those five marks as we move down one dimensionally form a series of shapes and then two and three dimensionally volumes so we're going to look at how this is going to move itself into photography and how artists and photographers have reconciled it to so starting with this is a drawing by Paolo Uccello he was a 16th century Italian artist and this is not a wire frame computer-generated drawing though it sort of looks like it could be and what he's demonstrating here is that the exercise of an artist is to see through things we don't look at things on the surface it's understanding shapes and volumes in depth because that piece of parchment that he drew this on is completely flat but when we look at it it appears like a chalice that we could reach our hands around and grab so he's creating an illusion that does not exist at all if we look at it in terms of photography there are two design problems that every photographer will have to deal with one is that photographs are two-dimensional they are flat we need to bring information to create a photograph that has depth and this is Constantin Manos from his Greek portfolio which I I think is an excellent sort of primer to a lot of design work and there are things that he's doing that he's not talking about that let us understand that the guy sitting at the table in the front is closer to us than the lighthouse in the back we can look at it and agree with without any problem that one is much further away from the other he's not saying I'm using atmospheric perspective to diminish the values as they recede in space he's not going to that because pictures don't speak the other thing that's happening is that images at least for the photographer are static but if somebody were to look at your portfolio and say your pictures look dead and pretty flat I'm going to assume the rest of the conversation is not going to go so well that's not an introduction to I think your work is excellent that something has gone terribly wrong so that inherent qualities of a photograph are actually they're not so favorable because dead and flat is not where we'd like to be we would like to be full of life and vibrant and moving so we're going to look at how photographers like katya person who is a sort of favorite of mine because he also comes from a drafting tradition how he's able to introduce a sense of movement into something that is still and we get the sensation that those women are just rotating around and inside of that frame they are moving around forever it's caught in constant motion it has a very different quality than what we just saw in the mannose picture and that's not accidental it's something he looked for and it's something that you will be able to look for as you go out and shoot so understanding that a picture is flat there are some things that we can do to play around with that and I'm sure that you've done this before where you've taken a picture of somebody and it looks like they have a horn coming out of their head they have accidental pigtails but they actually have a shaved head so they couldn't possibly be theirs that's because when we try and reconcile a three-dimensional space we have to understand how things move back and how one element layers itself on another now deliberately placed Brisson is playing a little bit of a game and this guy as a curtain not as a head but it's because of his careful selection of the scene that allows that to happen so we'll go back to painting for a second and this is a portrait by Raphael of baldassare castiglione and he is expressing a commonly known convention if is anybody looking at this know what this is illustrating as a convention what this line and the other in the second image is doing okay the next time you go to a museum look for this and see how often you find it painters had a knack for landing a dominant eye in a portrait right in the center of the image and what that does is it will create the illusion that the picture as you walk around the room is following you and you can imagine the hit that this would have been in the 1500s when cast a Leone finally puts this up in his Palazzo and he shows his friends and as he's walking around and all of his friends are watching the I follow him around they think that this is absolutely brilliant but it's something that is easily done if we're looking for it now Steve McCurry same thing the technique works very simply it's very subtle but it's effective and it's the type of thing where I see a lot of times in in teaching photography and hearing the dialogue around rules conventions people will often say like there's no rules in composition it's just you do whatever you like it doesn't really matter they're all the rules are made to be broken I try not to get too bogged down in the terminology around it we can call it a rule we can call it a convention a paradigm a guideline it doesn't matter but if you do that it's going to have an effect and there's a history of people who have done it in that same effect so I my approach is that it's better to understand where that comes from and use it or not use it you can break it or work with it but be aware of it yeah in this case it's the one that's actually closer to the lens she is looking at us and if I turn like this this eye is closer to you you can switch it you can make this one stronger by shifting yourself and you'll see as you as you look through images now with this you will notice in the way that faces are lit whether the artist is trying to pull the far side of the face forward sometimes they'll have the dominant eye closer to the face and this one will actually be lighter it will be lit from back here and what that will do is create it creates kind of an oscillation because the lighter element wants to come forward so it's as if the head is turning towards you and they play with this all the time you know that you look at a Rembrandt you look at a frog hauls it it would be breaking the convention it would be taking it to the convention and swapping it and saying you know what I want to do the other way so it's usually one or the other because for most heads we have to ice there is no third one to really play with unless it becomes a mystical conversation and then that one's a separate lecture right it's closer he shipped he shifted he's got his left shoulder closer to you and his eye closer to you so it's you know it's kind of under the surface but it's an effective way it'll get you a bunch of awards National Geographic Italy it will work well now when we're taking images because the painter has all day to refine the details make studies sketches shift the model they can work with brushes in a much more subtle manner and they can refine it forever somebody like DaVinci will work on a painting for years and it'll just sit and you come back to it Photography is different I think of photography as like painting with a roller you kind of get one shot to do it you just go up that's it there's a little bit you can do in post-production but if it gets too heavy it's really it looks forced it looks overworked so when we have a subject in a scene that maybe isn't a studio wall we want to have that subject read and the language that artists will use is will talk about a figure to ground relationship so in this it is an actual figure it is a woman sitting inside of a ground she is a dark figure on a light ground and again this is Constantine Munoz he's not saying in the caption look if you want to take a picture of an old lady in Greece Lander on the cleanest spot of plaster you can find behind her because it will read like a studio image it doesn't say that but the reason that we can tell that she is the subject and that that door is only a supporting element whichever screen you're looking at close one eye and then squint your other eye when you look at that you should see a really strong black shape on the left hand side against a very light background that is the strongest visual relationship in the entire frame and that's his subject if that happens somewhere else outside of the subject we start to run into a problem so we can take a dark figure on the light ground or we can have a light figure on a dark ground and establishing these type of light relationships which in this case is pretty basic I mean this guy's closer to the door the wall is further behind him but it lets us understand that he is the subject I know at the moment sort of street photography is this very popular growing genre of sort of confusion and madness most of the time this lesson hardly gets applied people go out on the street they take a snapshot they say that's my subject and you know it's a homeless guy wearing a wool jacket on the floor against a brick building and then like the white Hyundai in the background is just jumping out and that is sort of that is a type of visual illiteracy that we would like to get rid of because we are operating inside of the visual language so we want to speak it as well as possible along with my battalion the first two by Manos were basic and these are the types of lessons that I will give to photographers so that they can start to understand go out make five pictures dark figure on the light ground or light figure on a dark ground this is cocktail brisson and he is a few steps in front of everybody he takes the woman in the foreground a dark figure on a light ground and then the light figure on a dark ground this is purely a formal exercise it's we can see his draftsman roots in the image because this picture which is taken in Calgary Sardinia does not tell us anything about life in Sardinia this is not a cultural observation it hardly has any element of content in it it's really just a design game and he played these games a lot because traveling around the world on assignments sometimes you have things that are fun and exciting to shoot other times you don't and you have to invent things for yourself and the design game is something that sort of boils under the surface of an image somebody who gets quoted a lot like this comes up with like a-- things often as robert capa whose famous quote is that if your pictures are not good enough you're not close enough which is great if you are a war photographer but we don't need every single picture to be like right in somebody's face you know shooting up the nostrils of humanity is not the best angle for everyone there are points at which we would like to step back and observe the scale of things but if we're going to do that one thing we want to remember is that we want to keep a strong figure to ground relationship so that our subjects read and here we can see that the subjects read which is why I blow the picture out on the right hand side so that you don't have to squint but in looking at that we can understand that the brightest and the darkest relationship exists in the subject I see on forums argued endlessly that blacks advance or whites advance it's the relationship of those two next to each other that will jump forward you put the lightest light in the darkest dark next to each other you get a stop sign it's like a visual stop sign it just calls all of your attention right to that section which is why if you're shooting down in a building you need them to be so strongly lit otherwise they'll never be able to compete with the cars down below this is a picture by Ansel Adams and I like to try and include a variety only because I don't know if everybody out here is shooting landscapes if they're shooting people if you like shooting puppies or you like shooting nudes I don't know we haven't surveyed everybody so I want to try and include all of this so that everybody gets a little taste of it because the lessons of design apply to everything it doesn't matter what you're looking at or for you can apply this so Ansel Adams before being a famous photographer was nearly a professional pianist who likes Ansel Adams who is like in the realm of okay so he nearly had a career as a pianist and it works really well to look at rhythm in terms of his images because it's in a language that he would have understood really well and what we're looking at on the right-hand side is that in order to create rhythm in a picture we can think of the values like little light switches and we want to turn them on and off because every time Adams changes planes he changes values so we see on the left-hand side with the trees in the front and mountain in the back in the clouds he goes light dark light dark on the right-hand side he goes dark light dark light it's a visual rhythm that kind of pulses underneath the surface and he does it really well and it's why you can almost use as like a litmus test for artists and their of universal qualities is that everybody is kind of familiar with it they kind of enjoy it whether they love it or hate it there's something that they can appreciate in it even if they're not trained as artists to be able to articulate it but we want to be able to control or observe a scene so that we can utilize this because if we take a picture that is all white or all black you know we can go and hang out with Mark Rothko and just look at a big solid it's fine you know I understand where that arena comes from but there are only so many black photographs that you're going to make before you say like this is getting really boring I've got to do something else so this is kind of how he arranges it so that every time he changes planes he changes values he's a different version of the same concept this is Philip Jones Griffith in Vietnam and this could be an avid on shoot you know he's got a he's got an 18% gray background and he's got the lightest light and the darkest dark as traumatic looking as that is in the foreground and it's clear who is the subject that the subject reads what he shows us is that we can sort of agree that the background is uniformly gray more or less is that when you take her dark hand and you put it next to that gray it makes the left side of the picture light and the white on the other side makes the same gray on the other side dark so he's managed to play with the dynamic of the values so that by including a dark here this becomes light and including a light here this becomes dark but if you put this and this next to each other they basically be the same gray so he's adding a visual dynamic to it that really helps to activate it and gives that photograph a bit of a pulse one on the right is I just take it and soften it a little bit so that we can look at just the values once we soften it we forget about the details that's why we when we look at something if you close one eye and squint it will let you see the values you won't notice so much about the sharpness or the clarity all of this goes away because if you look at me and you close one eye and squint the other all you can see are the light and dark relationship in my face and that's what the picture on the right hand side is doing now what he's doing as a photographer is that he's not staging this he's observing when the light is is right it's right in that it lights his subject right so he didn't bring in studio lights to a hospital ward in Vietnam it's it's an observation of the moment same thing here that Rahsaan is doing and we can see the figure to ground relationship we have a little line you know the light heads on dark ground and then this repeated shadow that ticks through the entire piece and it's this effort to formalize a photographic scene and by formalize I mean he organizes it so that there are only three major directions in the whole piece I mean if you go outside and try and find something it only has three directions in it you'll probably take a lot of pictures of telephone poles and street signs and things but too far like a living dynamic scene that has really reduced to just three directions is this is a serious challenge it's a lot harder for somebody traveling around the world and somebody in a studio but this is just to give you kind of an advanced idea of what we can do with this game of visual rhythm here again is Konstantin Manos you know I won't really go into my my thoughts on decisive moment as a as a concept it's or that would be sort of a whole lecture unto itself but when we talk about like a moment where something's worth taking one element is when that moment is going to read if he had photographed that kid three steps earlier that kid would have been a dark figure against the dark ground he would have been invisible he just disappears so it's waiting for moments when the subject reads and here he finds it and we can see in the picture on the left on the right rather how he sees all of those light and dark relationships and he's I can't imagine I didn't see him shoot this picture but I can't imagine he was running down the street doing this he was probably camped out he sees this kid coming down the road he waits he waits he waits click that's his shot and then he moves on so it's not so much a chasing if we know what we're looking for in advance we can kind of get ourselves into a favorable position and just wait and it's a I think it's amazing how often if you have a sense of what you want to find how often it really comes up this is a picture by Gary winter grin we've looked at a bunch of images that were very clear and what I would consider to be successful when we look at the values in this when we look at the relationship of light and dark and we either squint our eyes or we look at the image on the right hand side what we what we can see is that the strongest visual element in this whole piece is this kind of hourglass shape here that's the lightest light of the darkest dark it turns out that's not really anything it's nothing it's the negative space between the sidewalk and a car in the background so while winter grant did take good pictures he successful images this happens to not be one of them and I think this is a case that has influenced a lot of street photography where there may be an interesting element in the scene the guy with no legs you know we can we can see it when we look at it but visually it doesn't really communicate very well I think there was probably a more successful way that he could have photographed this in order to get the subject to read in comparison to the other ones where they read really clearly so this image by Steve McCurry this sounds like a redundant concept but we want to light the subject if we're walking around looking for something and we see something interesting sometimes it's not really in a great place we need to kind of wait for it to move somewhere we need to wait for the light to be the strongest on the subject and not the strongest on the background or not the strongest in their outfit I tell you like if I ever have to shoot like businessmen no white shirts you don't want a white shirt you put a white shirt on a guy the only thing you see is the white it doesn't matter if he's albino any flesh tone will never compete with the white of a shirt you wear blue gray pink anything else because if you see too much of it it becomes the dominant element because these pictures they speak for themselves there are no captions where he can say like just cover the bottom a little bit pretend that was a little more burnt out and then yeah look towards the top that's the best part and on the scene like this this is Macari and Varanasi we have three subjects those figures the silhouette in the back and the silhouette in the front are supporting figures - the one that's lit and he does a really good job of balancing these but also showing that in what is more like a studio session you can light somebody so they read if you're out on the street you look for a scene and you work with it depending on how the lighting is so that the subject reads here again there's nothing that competes with the values in the guy sitting in the doorway there's nothing stronger than him he's not sitting against a white doorway the green and the blue are great they're subdued they're cool they sit in the background compared to his clothes his mustaches his hair everything about him jumps out because the figure the ground relationship in him is really strong and McCurry's good he's good at this there's nothing it's not like an accident that he's been wandering around Asian for 30 years coming back with successful images he's good at doing this he identifies the scene this is going to read this is going to work click that's my shot and if it doesn't work you'll just take the person and spin them around till it does work you know there's there are successful idioms that you can kind of understand and repeat and refine and I'm sure that as you look earlier in the archive the hit rate is a little lower but as it gets as he gets older and is reviewing his images and starts to see like this works he can go out and do this like all day long my dog is this image works in terms of its figure to ground relationship it is a light figure on a dark ground and I don't think anything else competes with him the water doesn't compete the architecture doesn't compete it's all yeah it's all about him now this isn't something that McCurry invented this is Velazquez in Spain in the 1600s right what he's showing us is that you light the most important guy with the best light the secondary one gets the number-2 spot and the tertiary one well he gets a little bit of candle light in the back but he didn't pay too much to be in the portrait so we don't really care so you take something like this which is a working idiom in terms of the lighting and in terms of the figures we get a profile view that the water carrier there who we're looking at in profile he could be like on the side of the nickel he could you know he can compete for any spot on any piece of currency anywhere in the world it's a perfect academic dead profile view we get a 3/4 view of the kid holding the cup and we get a frontal view of the drunkard in the back sucking down the water it's three very clean deliberate views there are no is we go through painting in comparison to photography there are no like accidental views the nice thing about human anatomy is it hasn't changed much maybe a hundred thousand years so as artists are working through they find that there are better and worse views of a human head and they tend not to include the really in between mediocre views they don't want those they want good strong views so we take this we go back to McCurry we see this is the same game this is a design game he has the strongest figure the lightest figure the biggest figure in the foreground and it's just a game of watching these diminish in value and in contrast as they move into the distance so what it does is it enhances the illusion of the third dimension this is not far we can imagine that from the guy in the back to the guy in the front it can't be more than I don't know maybe eight feet it's not a huge space but we get this incredible depth in that piece and that depth is enhanced by the fact that he has the strongest light on the one in the front and the light diminishes it moves into the background that adds to the level of atmospheric perspective right atmospheric perspective what happens if if you look at a white house on a hill four miles away that thing looks gray you might be able to see the color of the roof but atmospheric perspective in for a painter's eye is no different than for a photographer's eye is that all the junk in the atmosphere you know anybody fly into New Delhi Beijing you see like that atmospheric perspective it's heavy so that things that are black become grey and things that are white become grey they just migrate all towards the center and it creates the illusion that things are further away than they actually are so you can apply this at eight feet you can apply it at five miles but there are ways to do it so that it enhances it rather than diminishes it if there were a light on this guy in the background he would jump forward and McCurry doesn't want that so once we have subjects who are lit the next thing we want to consider is that what are we using I mean how many how many people are using medium format in the room who are on a square right one okay everybody else in 35 which means that you've got a long side to your picture you've got one side that is going longer horizontally then vertically and most cameras are easier to shoot horizontally as a result I see a lot of pictures shot in horizontal format they're actually verticals one question I get is well how do you know whether it's a vertical image or horizontal maybe it's not so clear one thing that you can do is when you look at a scene and you squint at it when I walk around in photograph I'm doing this all the time because it generalizes all of the directions and the values and scene and when you squint and you look at this and you see the vertical of the painting on the wall and all of those ponytails you can see that all of these are echoing the two verticals in the frame and by lengthening it one is going to lend itself better than if you turn it sideways and shoot it as a horizontal you know when we started with the visual language right vertical horizontal diagonal each of these lines has a tone it has kind of a quality to it that is just inherent in the line you know we sleep laying down when we're standing up we are fighting gravity we are vertical and when we're moving or at an angle because we're somewhere between the two so if we can match the the choice in which way we orient the camera to the action in the scene it's going to lend itself better you don't wear a bikini bottom and a tuxedo top they don't fit they don't they don't go together there's no sensibility between the two whereas here we see that there is a sense that is repeated and the vertical repetition of this is successful it also helps us when we look at a scene this is a photograph by Philip Jones Griffiths in my and na Miami in Vietnam not every scene is going to be all horizontal or all vertical you know life has a bunch of different directions so we want to be able to simplify it and this is where the artistic language helps the photographer because if we can stop looking at this for a second for what it is you know forget about the content and just look at who is the subject the subject in this is the girl who's dead in the back of the truck she has the stronger visual relationship you know it's maybe it's sort of a morbid way to look at it but we want to understand who is the subject is the subject reading and why did he decide to make this horizontal picture instead of a vertical it wasn't just because he wanted to fit her head to her toe you know it's he could there's a number of ways he could have stepped back made it of article got everybody to fit in there but he wanted to echo the girl and not the boy and that speaks to it we have the edge of the pickup truck we have this you know the makeshift bed stretcher that she's on and we have her and these horizontals are repeated repeated repeated offset by one vertical but one is sort of stronger than the other and it gives us a little bit of insight into how he's thinking about this now this I don't think is a brilliant image but it illustrates the idea that even with multiple directions one direction will be stronger than another and we would like to be able to decide which one is the one that we'd like to use in most cases it's the longest line in the frame if your longest line is a horizontal line chances are it's going to be a horizontal picture that's why most people take horizontal pictures of sunsets because it goes from edge to edge it's where I mean it's sort of a basic idea and it works in that level but as we get into more complicated scenes we have to be able to decide which way are we going and why are we going that way here's an example that verticals that horizontals which way does he go with it and the horizontals are the longest and most frequently repeated gesture in the entire thing and I think it works as a horizontal as a vertical there's a diagonal relationship that exists but all of those buildings really set it off the vertical line this is the you know gesture number two and I think it's a sort of a useful exercise to go out and challenge yourself with take ten verticals take ten horizontals and take ten diagonals it will probably take you a lot longer to get through that exercise then you would anticipate because after you shoot enough train tracks and taxicabs and street signs and you start shooting things that aren't all perfectly vertical and have some shape to it and you're just looking at the gesture when you're looking for something a little more interesting it can be come more challenging but it's an excellent exercise because as we're shooting or as we're using our roller we have to be able to decide these things fairly quickly we don't have all this fussing time like you know somebody does something you say like oh could you go back one second could you do that one more time it's gone it's done they may you know they even if they could go back and do it it'll be kind of stiff and rigid if you can get them to do it another example all of the vertical elements in this piece which I draw in on the right hand side we can see and it's it's a complete hallucination there are no actual straight lines in this scene but by looking at the photograph as an artist we can decide this is a vertical image here's Constantine - again this is a vertical image there are no straight lines there are no straight lines in his hand in her face in her tears everything is curved and moving but the gesture of that thing is vertical now when we have a combination of different directions that meet at a point we call this point an eye and these moments become really important because they allow us to key in on a section of an image and my feeling is that when you look at the image on the right and you see the intersection you see the dominant vertical in the darkest monk in the center the line of the heads and the diagonal that connects those piles of rubble around the soccer field with them I think when you see this point here and you look back at this you can't help but see that point with all the lines removed and that I think is kind of the nice thing about the visual language over algebra algebra you have to study and study and study or if you're an artist you really have to keep studying because you're not very good at math but with the visual language when you see something once when you see the dominant eye in the center when you see three directions meet at one eye when you see that all join together that you own it that's now your information and it's something that you can apply to all of your work that no longer needs or anybody instructing you you can go out and look for these visual relationships and and find them the last direction is the diagonal yeah the way the gesture of her leg is the most suggestive thing in the entire piece it communicates more clearly what's going on than any silly twitch of the hair or you know doe-eyed look in the mirror none of that stuff really communicates because I'll step out of the light from a distance from back here I can't see it if I walked up to this in a gallery Museum you wouldn't be able to tell what's going on until you start to get up really close and you can get into the details but if you have to look at a photograph with a magnifying glass it is a failure it doesn't work the gesture of it should speak clearly you can see a Picasso from a hundred miles away there's a black and white Picasso show right now at the Guggenheim you can see those posters that they have up on the lamppost from five blocks away the gesture of it is so strong and so clear is what we're typically presented with with artists and photographers is their successes they get the retrospectives the big shows they show the highlight reel there there are not a tremendous amount of contacts that are really published they appear in some books but really those ones they try not to show so that will be look at somebody's work we're usually seeing like the absolute best that they did and not the fifteen disasters that really led up to it and I find that if you can see those disasters it's helpful to understand how they refined it and how they were able to add an element each time to it so that you take a picture like this and you see the leg once and you say like oh that's good the next time that comes up if we can sort of gesture with the body so we have the leg in the body oh and the gaze comes into it and the hair connect oh that you start to see there all of these little design elements that we can build on each other it's like making a recipe and it's the difference between making toast and a souffle it's like one is just in out done you can screw it up you can burn it but there's not too much you're going to be able to do with it versus what we could build here that makes sense this is Macari in India even without seeing the direction we can tell which way he's going when we compose in the diagonal it's so strong that we don't even need to see his feet we know he is moving and we know which direction he's moving and if we're cartier-bresson we're going to take that exercise and we're going to line it up the same way that he did with the knot on the guy's head I think this picture is really intended for her to appear as if she's walking down the banister in the foreground we know our rational mind wants to keep her walking this way but he is caught her at this moment and I am sure when he looked at this contact he enjoyed it that it looks like she is walking down a piece that is probably 20 feet in front of her and this becomes I think some of the fun design games that we can play because as a photographer we can play with these visual relationships in front and behind and unify things that don't have anything to do with one another she could not care less about that handrail and the handrail has never cared about anybody in its life but Brisson through his careful selection has brought them into a dialogue with one another same thing we see Rubens here crucifixion of Christ now he puts hercules in the bottom corner and all of the force of that colossal figure hosting the cross up in the up in the sky just it wouldn't really work as a vertical you think of a vertical like a soldier holding a pole there's no real strength in it it's just stoic it's like a statue this thing is alive and the diagonal allows for an image to have the greatest amount of life because it is somewhere between standing and falling it's constantly in motion and it's in motion forever this is Steve McCurry not his finest work this is I think a visual exercise of how we can start using these techniques and I think he looks at this scene and it's you know it's not his masterpiece it's a perfectly successful image but I think he looks at it and he sees a palm tree tipped over and he sees the little monk reading at the same angle and he says same same click that's his picture gaze leg same click there's a continuity to it it's totally simplified to directions and the whole thing and it works he does the same thing here he's standing in the room I wasn't standing here with him when he took this so I'm gonna guess on what happened here but from looking at this picture it looks as if he sees all the diagonals on the wall he sees the relationship of the monk in the background and the young monk in the foreground and he either waits for the moment when that kid turns or he just goes and click he's got the strongest figure to ground on the subject it separates the kid in the front from the figure in the back we know the figure in the back is only a supporting figure because the visual element all that figure to ground relationship is on the kid in the front here we have an example of Brisson and this is a more elegant solution I don't expect students to ever come back with anything like this this is sort of this is after after he's practiced this for years he's able to identify there's a dominant horizontal in the scene there's a dominant vertical in the scene and when all three of those come together along the diagonal he has a masterful photograph now what I think this allows him to do and this is cocked a person taking a picture of his friend and sculptor Alberto Giacometti installing his show I think when you can start to identify directions in a scene before they happen it lets you know where you want to be and what you want to happen and I think he saw the two sculptures and the sculpture that Giacometti is carrying ostensibly was on the ground behind him and he had time to watch Giacometti turn around grab the sculpture pick it up and the second that he turns and his leg is parallel to the sculpture in the front that's his shot so it's not this is not at ISO 10000 he is not using anything fancy this is not a 1/4 lens the game of speed in photography is anticipation and not technical features because he's on film slow film camera you know there's nothing really speedy about this other than the fact that he can see where it's coming from and he can identify where he wants the action to happen and sometimes it doesn't occur but it will let you kind of look into things so that you can anticipate the movement we talked about all the straight lines every like straight line sort of makes sense now three directions you know we've we've got our choice and we have free rein and what we'd like to do with them the curve is a little more complicated any engineers in the room easier to quantify 90 degrees or curves right I mean it's like it's mindless you this is vertical this is horizontal it's just simple you start throwing cars in the mix and things get a little more complicated it's possible and I like to show it so that it's something that we can all work up to but to come right out of the box and shoot it it can be a little frustrating because it's complicated and in this case Manos also needs the collaboration of three disconnected figures to form that curve which sweeps through the entire piece but it is possible you know painters used to use a technique have your big canvas stretched out you take a nail whack it in the bottom take a string piece of your paintbrush piece of chalk and you could just swing a compass wing you had a ready-made compass that you could tack all the way around the canvas on any side and this is what cartier-bresson is doing it's the same exact thing he's just running compass sweeps all the way through the photograph and when he sees that procession he sees one two three sweeps figure to ground is strongest in the subject click he's got a shot here he is in India same thing this is his arabesque he's taking all these disconnected people and unifying them with one simple gesture and he goes out and he looks for this and he finds it anytime that you can see the front in the back of something it implies that it's moving you know everybody's familiar with the Sistine Chapel right you see like Michelangelo's Libyan Sibyl where she's like twisted with the book anytime you can see the front the back of something it's because it's twisting and it's moving here this whole progression we see the front side on the left the backside on the right the front side again on the left it sort of moves it has its own rhythm throughout the whole scene and we can the thing that I like about using cartier-bresson is that he has such a consistent body of work where you can see him building these idioms and he tries them small and he tries them big and he tries them and they work and he tries them and they sometimes they don't work but he finds them all over the globe the content is typically irrelevant it doesn't matter he's just playing this design game here he plays a smaller version of it so that it can exist at any scale we don't need to go to India to take all of our pictures he can take it right on right at home in France if you're him but it allows him to organize a scene to bring some unity to that image and some dignity to his good friend who he's photographing here now when we look at objects receding and spank in space and we look at perspective we can understand how we can create sort of a vast scene based on the way that we shoot it there is a way to shoot this crowd so that it looks like chaos you can shoot it from the back and just see a thousand heads it look like every concert where you got rotten seats - it would look just like that and it's no good nobody wants to see that when we can get around and find some level of abstract organization inside of the scene all of a sudden that thing starts to have a gesture it has a motion it has a dynamic here's where son he takes this and he has a single point where everything radiates out from it's like us it's like sunrays it's like sunrays with arms it's the same thing he just waits for all of the gestures to be unified in the arms and the hands and the ropes and the barriers and it creates this level of expansion inside the whole thing and this again is it total it's an abstraction it doesn't it has less to do with what he's shooting and more to do with how he's shooting it and what this does is this allows him to play figures in a space the last section of images that I want to share with you guys this is some of my own work and what I had found was the most helpful in my photographic development was when I could ask a photographer looking at their pictures like what worked and what didn't work you know like what was the thing that stood out to you that you think that is a picture and that there wasn't something better that you can do so I have this kind of split up by project more or less from most recently I just got back from a month in Japan photographing a series on Japanese master craftsmen so it's going to be some color work and some black-and-white and this was one of the first guys that I spent time with and he's a fifth-generation blacksmith he makes swords scissors for iki Bona and gardeners and knives so it was really an interesting opportunity to see somebody working in completely traditional styles in a studio I mean the studio had a mixed earthen floor and dirt floor but looking at all of the formal qualities of the work you know that you know the back story behind it is kind of interesting I hope for the you know for the viewers but from a formal aspect looking at why I think this image works and why it's successful as a portrait and why it feels as if it's kind of alive and it's it's in the gesture of the hand it's also that there's a turn to the head you know da Vinci wrote a really interesting book a treatise on painting for young artists where he kind of outlines a guide about 180 pages and he said if you want to make a living portrait of somebody don't have their chest in their head point the same direction that's what dead people look like you want to have a turn you think of the Mona Lisa like her head is turned looking at you and it's subtle you know if you want somebody like caught in thought and like just zoned out meditative thought sometimes having the head in the chest in the same direction works for you in here I wanted something that was more active to show how he was engaging he was checking his apprentices work and he was describing what he needed to do to restore this knife and file the tip of it further it's the whole gesture of this is is important it's it's um it adds a level of balance I hope and also it's intentional as I'm watching him move around I'm trying to juggle him on that clear spot of wall behind him because that rack next to him is pretty distracting and when he goes back the other way it doesn't work and then when his head tips into the backlit door it also doesn't work so as I'm shooting I'm actually shooting like this with my back like up against the wall the student the studios and the workshops were all generally pretty small so I was I would get myself into a spot and kind of commit to select well I think this is going to be the best angle and for better for worse I'm going to have to deal with it because I'm not really going to be able to shift around all that much and that is kind of part of the game of photography's being able you know like October Sun did with Giacometti to like anticipate the action it's something that we practice at and work sometimes in our favor and other times it doesn't this is the apprentice working on the same you know working on the same knife and you'll see also generally here you know his eye and his nose running right down through the center and trying to catch it you know I want him to be alive he's a 23 year old French he's a French kid who comes from a blacksmith background but this is you know he's very young in this tradition he's going to spend 10 years minimum as an apprentice with Yasir hero because there's a lot for him to learn I mean even looking around the workshop you just like the machinery the forges half of these things the forges they they make all by hand they break them down and they recycle them he's going to have to learn how to run use and be not proficient but masterful in all of these to be able to inherit this so I he has a kind of it's a quiet excitement tool but he's really into this this is going to be his life these guys they work 12-hour days and they're just they're there from 7:00 in the morning you know itself sometimes later than 10 o'clock at night and they live for this stuff so I want to be able to you know kind of pay that amount of respect to them because they're putting that much work into it so I hope to be able to bring the pictures to as much life afterwards as possible now I I kind of I certainly had some preconceived notions on what I thought it would be like to spend time with somebody who was he's actually he's a national treasure the Japanese government has him like deified and they give you know he gets government support and things and you kind of anticipate somebody who is often referred to as a master of their craft I don't know maybe having a little bit of an error or a pretense about it or just like you know I've been doing it for 45 years yeah I'm good at it I know I'm good at it but he was just there like the softest most lighthearted guy and I have really starting pitchers of him that looked the way that I think you kind of expect him to look and then these other ones were you know oh I know a lot of photographers who don't want smiling people they go like out of their way if somebody smiling will say like stop smiling I don't want you doing it because they have an image of what they would like that person to be doing and sometimes smiling doesn't work but I think in the nature of what he was presenting like this is him this is the way he is so I wanted to be able to do that and you know in a single portrait something like this I'm looking for those relationships that simple figure to ground the lit subject I hope that we can just see a connection that all of these artists and it's a tradition that I consider myself at the very back end at you know very tiny small growing bit of what living artists are doing now but continuing it because it's a continuous language this was a husband-and-wife team in Fuji and the tea estates and I think we can see if I say diagonal now like you guys can see what I'm going for you can see where it comes from and why you know I'm running in between these tea bushes you know you can't you can see you can't like run across them you have to run like in one to the very end and you get to a spot and then the other one goes the other way you can't back up any further so getting them as they come across it's this you know back and forth game to be able to fit into it but what I'm looking for is I'm looking for the value relationships and the foreground to be very strong and for all of those ridges to dunk and kind of diminish into a soft gray so that you get the sense that that other Hill is like Far Far Away I don't want it to feel like that Hill is sort of like creeping down and landing on top of them and I think about you know there's a level of photography that I think is intuitive there's a level that is practiced and the merger between the two sometimes it can't be perfectly articulated but there are these kind of basic gestures that you're I feel I'm looking for like I'm looking for it all the time and it's a conscious decision yeah these mm-hmm because that person energy even though smaller is better lift you see them as kind of people I see them as a bit of a pair um he is he is the larger figure he was he drives that machine she is kind of a supporting character to it he well he's he's a little further from he's a little further from me and but I think he looks a bit he is actually a bit bigger than her and he reads a bit larger so I he is driving the ship I am happy to let him drive the ship he was in in sort of other pictures that I had where there was a different push and pull I preferred this because he is filling the diagonal going from the bottom left-hand corner to the upper right and he really controls it a lot better and she just kind of like guides it along I try to balance them so that they look like they could show up at the same dinner table if they look to disparate I mean sometimes maybe you want the contrast you want two completely different people or you want some level of unity here they have like similar valued clothing like there are some people I'll see if one's in black and ones in white I have a huge problem right off the bat this was like everybody's kind of in like pastelly earth tones so like I'm in business they're both light figures against the dark ground of the tea like if one of them if his shirt was like the same color as his pants he would never read he would just blend into the background and just disappear and I would say like you know I've got no shot and sometimes it happens you show up to a place you can't control what everybody's wearing and you you just know you have to take a few pictures to you know appear as if you're doing something but you know that there's no picture to be had there you know something like this this was very this was a bit easier you know he's he's a bamboo grower and craftsman and he lives this house is his great great grandfather's house and watching him in this scene he was a really philosophical guy and made he everything was analogous to bamboos human society family relationships development of business you could find some way to relate it to bamboo and he did and it was fascinating because it formed his entire language everything just came out of what he knew and what he grew up with and I think having him like in this setting you know like we sat down and he also he pointed out to me that he said like everybody that you're going to meet in Japan uses my bamboo somebody does the tea guys use it the musicians use it the calligraphers use it the knife guys everybody needs this it's but you can't study bamboo and not study Japanese society the two of them are so woven together that one kind of defines the other so you know his his wife would make his tea and we would sit at the table and this was about a two-hour conversation now one thing that happened in the course of this his wife had come in he had moved over and fixed something and I had a moment where this doorway was growing out of the back of his head it's like the palm tree right I have no objection with anybody you know the photo documentarian who like will never interfere this is not me I said like I know we're gonna be here for another 45 minutes then you know the next cup of tea just came out we're not going anywhere could you just slide one foot to your left or my left your right that will just make life infinitely easier and I can start shooting again because with that pole growing out of his head the divider in the screens behind that Shoji was just going to kill anything that was going to happen so you know formal arrangements can be worked around and you can get somebody to go back to being normal and sometimes you just have to like push their dinner chair or just say could you slide a little bit that way and we're okay good go back to doing we're perfect this was in Venice Italy this is a place called square oh the center of Oz oh and it is one of the last there are two remaining boat yards but they still make in fixed gondolas in Venice and I'm sort of interested in Craftsman traditions they sort of fascinate me I'm I'm curious as to like how one thing goes from one generation to the next because this stuff doesn't get written down you have to in many cases you kind of have to suffer through it as the apprentice you just kind of learn it through absorption and what I find is that whether you're in Italy or you're in Japan the education is the same you don't ask questions you simply watch and that's the way it's been and that's the way it will probably stay for as long as these things continue but going here and you know having the opportunity to see this there are a bunch of boats in the yard and I am looking for the ones that are going front back front back I'm looking for that rhythm this is not like there is nothing accidental and I don't think in my in the way that I work I'm looking for these visual relationships they're things that I have practiced and they're repeatable and they're things that you can I think that you can teach them it's not this I hate when I see photographers who are discarded so like oh I just I don't have an eye like he's really good at it or she's great and I just like I can't get it I don't these are formal relationships we put a cube and a sphere on a table you do a bunch of exercises you can start to see these things and when you see them and you go back out into the real world all of a sudden the things that you start to see change and I think it's completely accessible it's a thing that I like about photography over sculpture is that like sculpture is not the easiest thing to start over the weekend it's not the kind of thing you're just going to like jump up and get a space and all of a sudden you're going to be forging metal and carving what it's just it it's do labor-intensive it's a pain in the neck it's really fulfilling but it's it doesn't have an accessibility that like I find particularly when I travel people will say and I'm sure this happens to all of you can I see some of your work and when people look at photographs they get them instantly and I love that they look at sculpture and they go yeah that's interesting you know it doesn't have that accessibility I mean I'm sure you've walked into you know mo-more the Guggenheim and you know looked at the paint bucket in the corner and wonder like is that an installation is that a piece of artwork but did the janitor just forget to take the paint bucket out of here it's a different conversation so it's something that I really enjoys the accessibility of photography it travels really well and it speaks across language barriers you know my third-grade Italian worked here it was helpful and this was Fabio he was one of the one of the guys working there and again it's just simple figure to ground designing on the diagonal all of the basics that I teach the people I use myself because they work and they're effective it lets you organize the scene it lets you pick out of a out of a workshop that had stuff everywhere there was no order to anything all the guys died tomorrow and somebody had to walk in there and figure out what they were doing if there weren't gondolas you wouldn't be able to tell from the stuff around it was just chaos of wood and planes and chisels and like it just totally haphazard they could have made doors they could have made boats nobody would have known because all of you know I'm interested in the fact that like all of the ideas are really locked inside of them but there are these kind of clear moments that communicate their level of intensity and dedication to the craft and it's my responsibility to find one so that it can go out and speak to somebody else the previous photo of that white Daisy thing on his shirt drawing my eye it was the goofiest it was like a it looked to me like something like my little sister would wear it was like next to these Tahitian tattoos that are like all the way down his arm it was it was an odd little detail now I will admit that there was a French guy who had knocked on the door earlier about a half an hour earlier and asked if he could buy a gondola his response to it I won't repeat they have a thing against foul language he wasn't too keen on it so in the case with Miki sonnet the bamboo guy him I was going to ask him to move a little his little Daisy I wasn't going to say anything about it we're going to let that be for the day it's a detail that he owned it could have been a little Hello Kitty thing it's sort of it was an interesting contrast for a guy who was not so happy earlier in the morning so I said I will leave it but you're right he'd like it glows in there and this is the way they come together I thought it was kind of interesting that a gondola which gets painted black is actually made of seven different types of wood each one serving a completely different aquatic or structural function and all of the templates that they have on the wall are still all they're just kind of passed from generation to the next there's no papers or manuals or anything everything's just made off of these templates that I'm sure they use until they get too rounded off to be precise enough anymore and then they have to make a new one no this is all this is all natural I don't think I have anything here that has there's certainly no flash I don't even think I have reflectors sometimes with portraits I will use you know reflectors or diffusers but this is all natural natural light these were a skylit and kind of open sheds all the way through same with this one this is this is a series that I did on construction workers here in New York City and I really kind of get a kick out of the fact I mean you know between the crane falling down on the storm and the New Yorkers are kind of acutely aware of the fact that their city is constantly being worked on and in spite of all of the technological advances and buildings and you know we just watch things like fly up these ladders they probably don't look much different than what the Egyptians used there are just some basic elements of construction that like the top floor isn't built yet there are no stairs it's like it's the same thing it has the little Raphael use pencils we use pencils there's some things that just are not going to change and you know the morning light here as the Sun is coming up over on the east side I think lets us just know that I'm interested here even if I'm not explaining it in the ladders that's that's my subject this is Eric one of the carpenters up on the top and my goal with this one he is analogous to that building I'm I'm intentionally playing the relationship of him on that building I photographed him two steps to the left so that there's a gap between the building and his face and I went to the right so that he is framed entirely by the building and this one where the building divides him to me was the most successful in terms of bringing those two elements together because that tower is still half a block in another block away you know it's it's really far off in reality but in this case I'm pulling it closer so that I can use it as a backdrop to him so it's you know it's a fun push and pull that we can that we can do with photographs and I talked about the head this is Jimmy they had spent this is probably like our eight or nine they were actually raising the crane this day and they had to kind of wrestle the brackets in it wasn't quite lining up so this is after a bit and he's taking kind of a breather and he is just I mean I'm shooting this the 50 millimeter lens you know I'm about this far from him he's not that far away and he is just like off in his own world and by looking at how his face is pointing in relationship to his chest like he is just a frozen statue and you know I encourage everybody to anything that I've said don't believe it just because I said it you try it one way you try it the other way and see what happens see if it works see if you come back and you say like I try this stuff Adams talking about it was garbage you know anybody's nonsense or yeah it actually does happen 35:35 50 and 90 is usually solves most of my problems portraits are 90 flatout I usually have to just there are some that I need to take care of and that's sort of like a separate component to anytime I'm shooting a lot of the time I like 50 but if I'm going to be in close quarters and I can't really get a distance like in Venice I was going to be able to walk around get back I knew that space had a little more room so I can use a 50 I'm not into heavy distortion I don't like shooting humans with a 28 or 21 it just they Bend and move and it's it's a stylistic decision that I'm like I'm not into I'll usually stop with people at 35 and in Japan I had to use a 35 a lot because I didn't have the room or I was shooting more than one person you start shooting two three people with a 50 you start getting way back you know like if I wanted to shoot you three it's like a fifty I'm going to be way back here it's kind of it's too far so I half the time have a sense of what I'm going to be shooting when I go into it or I've been there before so I there is some idea as to what's coming worst comes to worst two cameras but I'm not like a I try not to carry too much I like a lighter load right so this is like this is the tail end of the 50 that's as far as the 50 is going to be able to do it and like if this were if I couldn't get up to so I'm at the edge of the building you know those cranes are tacked right onto the building so that cranes not too far out it's only like another 12 feet out so I can still do it and this day we happen to have a clear sky so I have a really good clean figure to ground relationship on those two guys out there so it works if it were a cloudy sky there's a chance this photograph wouldn't really read it wouldn't communicate nearly as well these guys were bending all the rebar for the concrete up on top this again it in a scene that has so much chaos I mean who's been on to a construction site right it's a nightmare this is junk everywhere I mean I I spent 10 years in construction before doing photography like it's a mess there's just stuff everywhere trades all over the place you've got 400 guys working on a jobsite you know it's like the worst version of prep school professional you could ever come across there's just lyrical I mean everything so one of the things that I'm looking for is like how am I gonna be able to clean this up how am I going to be able to communicate like what I'm shooting and that it just doesn't looks like some random snapshot on 42nd Street with a million people crossing the road at the same time clear skies help bend the knees a little bit you know I see a lot of photographers do this and tip and shoot down this like this doesn't work you know this is really really important it's a you know it's kind of an exercise game we have to be able to move to be able to clean it up this was in Matera Italy I'm with a 50 millimeter in the middle of the street with the bus that she is looking at coming towards me I don't recommend this this is not intelligent but I had seen the scene - him and I was interested in following this arabesque linking all of the heads so just waited the bus looked like it was far enough so that the second that he filled in that space that was the picture that's what I'm looking for there's something very kind of clear in that and it's there's a unity in that all of those people are from that town there is kind of a local quality about everything there with the architecture there's no coca-cola sign in the background Starbucks hasn't populated itself yet in Matera so it's it it has a level of unity that I'm you know that I'm really interested in and that's sort of why that picture would happen here all the way through the roofs down you know back up to the staircase could it have been nice if somebody was sitting on the terrace sure but it was an overcast day so nobody came out so it is what it is this one I was inside his 12th century Church built into the side of a cave I couldn't have paid a better good-looking guy to walk by you know with the jacket and the hat what are the odds could I push them two feet out into the middle of the street sure I would have loved him there but I was interested in him connecting with this this is like a half day's walk down this is incredibly far down the valley and he's standing there because they actually drive on this so you know he wanted to see dinner time so he stood there but that's I think what happens is that you will start to look for scenes and if you just sit and wait I mean this is a few minutes this why I wasn't there for like a half an hour I had gone inside went up to this sort of balcony looking thing looked down the street on two sides saw a few people coming he was one of them that was the shot here again I love the design of the scene totally showed up it just ticks all the way through right up around the arch you wait the light is nice everything is kind of right and nobody shows up it happens here I tried to shoot this church the whole time I was there and I couldn't find anything of any sense that would like let me shoot it and it had rained for two days walking we were going back to the hotel before dinner and the sky cleared and like this thing just like lit Tower and then within eight minutes was like totally gone it's a simple figure to ground relationship it's set on one diagonal coming from the upper left-hand corner that just slices right through into the into the tower of the church and that's like it's what stood out to me and I think you'll be able to find these combinations of lighting and design that happened in one here I was in a project in the South Pacific some things just they line up easier this is like you know a hole in one I find this guy this is an Independence Day and you know he's sitting in the grass by the fields where all the celebrations are going on the light is right the background is subdued there are there are no major violations of any sort of sort set on a simple diagonal simple vertical that runs down through his eye and through his leg and like that's it I've got a shot so some days you work harder for them than others other times you have to kind of bounce around a little bit these are the guys preparing their local drink kava which I don't know if anybody's been to the South Pacific and had this stuff it's looks like brown dirt water makes your mouth go numb you kind of don't want to look at any like bright lights after you drink it it's it's an acquired taste it's not so bad but that's what their that's what they're preparing here and the the series in Tana which was the island was looking at from the oldest generation down to the youngest so we just this is sort of a condensed version of it but her and her drooling self again we can think of da Vinci in the head turn she's at the doorway she's playing around she's looking at me she's smiling and the second she turns click that's the shot same here opposite direction in Varanasi in India this one I think now after the design we can see dominant verticals unified on a single diagonal and it kind of adds to the to the interaction that these guys are having sometimes you'll see a picture you'll take a picture of two people talking it won't actually look like they're engaged so it's if you can unify the design underneath what they're actually doing it will kind of help the image even further in terms of two people being engaged if you if you take your hand and you hold it up and you cover the hands in the center so that you can't see this gesture coming up they're looking at each other but the interaction is a little lackluster it's a little lukewarm when the gesture in the conversation can unify in this case unify them on a diagonal that runs from the bottom right hand side up through the upper left by unifying the design this relationship here that is echoed in the doors draws your eye to do this and that's what I'm looking for is for elements that echo the design and that brings it together for me work because I there you know the other picture is when the gesture and the architecture don't match up it's just not really as strong here is the same the parallel of the back of his arm and the leg give us the run as he's scampering out of the out of the alleyway you have a picture of three people on the scene if you've got one looking and two looking away it's easy to find your subject you know when I see big group shots if you can get like five people not really looking and then one person who's facing you it's like that's the subject it sort of communicates clearly you try and do it first with two people you have two people standing on a subway platform one looking one not looking you're like okay this works and you do to people not looking one person looking still works you do it with four you can run them in a circle but it starts to let you play and like look through crowds to see what's happening what's sort of bubbling up there one looking to not looking one being dragged out of the water didn't want to take a bath in the ocean I don't blame him but as a formal arrangement that's what I'm you know looking and waiting for this is a lighting exercise this is the Finny che in Venice I had actually read a story about what of all the times that it's burnt to the ground three in its lifetime and having that story in my head and then being in Venice it looked as if there was a fire burning inside of there and with the strongest light pouring out of that building I mean this was like put the camera on the wall by the water eight second exposure click done it was like there's sort of nothing to it if everything like mentally had just fallen into place and I saw it and it just it was like seeing a memory of something that I already knew and then that was it know sort of around the world back to New York I like to take students to the Met because there's a lot of work we can see on the walls and there's a lot of fun things that we can do with the sculptures there and the paintings there and when you play one against the other this scene now if you go to the Met this is in the American sculpture wing there's a kiosk on that wall now so for the time being this shot is not possible you can get information about the gallery but unfortunately the kiosk has killed the shot so you know this the way that this the way that I do this and what I think is really fun is that looking at the sculpture I see it there's a flow of people that comes out of the American painting galleries and the Egyptian wing and they just pass through and it's just a matter of waiting waiting I would have been happy enough had he not looked but he happened to look and it made it even better so the serendipitous you know finds that occur on top of what you're looking for I think they only make it better thank you very much guys if you if anybody has any questions afterwards I'm I'm not leaving we just have to turn over the space so I really appreciate it for more information please visit us online give us a call or stop by our new york city superstore you can also connect with us on the web

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 301,861

Keywords: Italy, Adam Marelli, BH Photo Video, bh, photography, BH Photo, bhvideos, video, photo, bh photo, pro audio, B&H, B&H Event Space, Japan, bridging, the, gap, classical, art, designed, for, photographers, adam, marelli

Id: zwk3YFknyNA

Length: 86min 50sec (5210 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 24 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/enxenogen]

Thanks, that was very worthwhile. I usually won't watch a long video like that all the way through. And, I wish there were a part ii.

[u/kyleclements]

This video was fantastic. I hear a lot of tutorials that give vague, generic , and utterly useless advice "follow the rule of thirds. Use the zone system" This guy breaks it down and makes it very clear why he is giving the advice that he does.

Great find.

[u/TooDamnSpicy]

If anyone is interested, it seems he has a website as well: http://www.adammarelliphoto.com/

[u/le_bravery]

This was definitely worth a watch. I'm going to look a lot harder at Subject/Ground relationships, for sure.

[u/Neil_young_freak]

It's a great video, but the speaker is awfully condescending...