Oh, hi Mark.
A lot of my photography and cinematography derives from other artists’ framing and lighting techniques.
Usually that’s the case for any creative work for most people: picking and “stealing” off of a bunch of other artists and combining the techniques and styles with what you knew before them to make your own style. One of the people I have picked off of in terms of both framing and lighting within my work is in fact Ben Goossens. I would say that nearly every shot I take in a film or in a photograph, without hesitance I think of rule of thirds and how it should be incorporated within my shot. That includes whether it shouldn’t be that heavily used as well. Ben Goossens has a very unique, yet continuous style in that, many of his pictures are very surreal. A lot of the surrealism usually is incorporated within human characteristics he has drawn and painted out.
One reoccurring theme that Goossens seems to enjoy touching base on is the face. In at least one out of every six pictures, there is a painting of a man without a face, or a painting of a man with his face in a cage, or a painting of a lot of facial features (eyes, nose, mouth) placed in places they aren’t normally seen. Drawing the human face well is a difficult task to pull off, however, making someone draw the human face in their head is an even greater feat. Before I go on about that I’m going to talk a little more about his style. In most every single one of his pictures, Goossens loves to make use of great depth and extremely noticeable use of the rule of thirds within his photos. If you see here, a few photos that I have taken use the same technique, with one object in the foreground to one side of the frame, kind of pointing to a much smaller or further away object near the background on the near opposite side of the frame. It’s a style that a few of my friends and myself back at home just seem to find very aesthetically pleasing (no, we don’t like to overuse this, but when we use it, it makes us happy. Just don’t ask.)
Now that those three hundred and eighty words are taken care of, I will begin to talk about what I’m actually supposed to talk about. This photo Ben Goossens took. It’s called I think, I’m a Dreamer.
It uses all of the techniques I was talking about just a second ago but I will heavily examine all the little details right now. First of all the center of attention right here is nothing. It’s supposed to be something, but Goossens tricks our eyes into paying the most attention to nothing. Using the rule of thirds, color value, surrealism, lines, and shapes: Goossens tells his audience to look at an invisible man wearing a tuxedo and a classy hat. The piece shows a clean single shot of a man who is all dressed up but has no face. He has no head. He just isn’t. First, our attention is subconsciously thrown into that area of the screen due to the rule of thirds. The place where this man’s head should be is placed in the exact area most people look when they first examine a frame: a diagonal inch away from the top left corner. In this exact same spot, the picture is the brightest and whitest and it pops out the most. It is not just a plain white, it contrasts with the rest of the somewhat dark painting and the area is kind of feathered out, giving it a kind of bright-white glow, which would attract anyone to that point looking at this picture. After examining this picture the next thing you may notice is a tree. The tree is very far away, this you can tell because of its size and placement in relation to the horizon line. This gives this picture a large sense of deep space. An even greater effect that adds to this deep space are the birds in this picture, directing the invisible man’s line of eyesight to this tree, connecting a perspective line of depth between the two objects. Also the background and the foreground are very high in contrast as the man and the sky are in a monochromatic black and white scheme while the tree and the field are in a green and yellow (god damn packers) analogous scheme. I know that doesn’t have to do with line and shape and more with lighting but I felt like putting that in there anyway. This is why I was so drawn to his image. To summarize it was because of the surrealism, intriguing depth, and interesting color scheme, and the way I framed it was just to frame it, there was really no reason as to why I did it in this certain way.
Well to get a good grade I have to tell you that I did for a certain reason, so now that I think about it, I actually framed this just so you could see a clean single of this invisible man just centered in the screen. This is to show you how much more boring and cramped you feel looking at this picture rather than the original: there is no more depth, the picture is pretty flat; the brightest spot of the picture is now his shirt and that really doesn’t stand out or matter, the surrealism is still there but it’s just much less intriguing because the good use of the rule of thirds as been taken away. Yes, still his “head” is not centered, at least he is above the top line of the rule of thirds, but he is almost dead center and that’s very boring to the viewer. There is no more tree, so there isn’t much depth. There is a line connecting his eyes to nothing so that’s boring. The reframing of this picture is to prove a point, to show that all the techniques he used to create interest were there for a reason, without them this picture is terribly boring.
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