Originally Posted by
Bruce Barlow
ROL - We have students learn the same ideas and concepts taught to art students when learning how to draw, with minimal lectures and heavy-on-the-exercises. Art teachers and artists with whom I've vetted the curriculum are impressed. One teacher blatantly asked to steal the curriculum. I gave it to her, which I thought was nicer.
At core, we like the idea of Heads, Hands and Heart, where Head is finding the subject, Hands is the technical craft, and Heart is the emotional connection. A successful picture balances all three, says Dorothy Sayers in "The Mind of the Maker," a must-read for any photographer. The first two are relatively easy, and I was told for years that Heart was as much luck as anything.
That sounded wrong to me, and so I set out to systematically explore how elements of composition affected me emotionally. For instance, I have a different emotional response to a vertical line than I have to a horizontal one, and those are different from diagonals, and so on. Exercise: Find a strong linear element and make all the pictures, pointing the line at each hour of an imaginary clock face. Get a single malt scotch (not included in the materials fee) and look at the pictures, trying to feel the emotional response that each line evokes. Understand them, and file that information away in your brain. Do the same with the Rule of Thirds: when the object is at the 10-o'clock position, my response is different than at 4:00. I want to know that, and found huge value in making the pictures and looking at them. So I made pictures at each position of the clock. Yup, for me the response to each is different, and I'm better for having explicitly done the exercise, even at my advanced age and supposed vast experience.
We'll also talk about tone, color, weight, balance, form, motion, and other aspects of putting stuff into a viewfinder. All with exercises.
I developed these ideas for this workshop two years ago, and taught them at the first of these workshops at Peters Valley with great feedback. From that, I further developed ideas and wrote "More Finely Focused," which has, uh, I think 60 exercises, all of which I have done. Richard taught this workshop last year when I was travelling around the country, and this year Andy and I thought it would be fun for Richard and me to team-teach it. I can't wait. Richard is an extraordinary teacher, as well as one of the finest human beings I know. Andy is about as much fun as a person can get, and a terrific host. We're going to have a great time.
So those are the types of ideas and exercises that we do, and then at the end, much as in the book, we tell students to "forget it all" when they photograph, because getting caught up in their compositional knickers will spoil the experience. That said, all those exercises are swimming around in their brains, and sneak into their pictures. I think we pass your specificity test, and if not, well, it's the best I can do. Thanks for the comment!
