P#20 Q1G: What Are a Few More Exercises We Can Do To Develop an Artistic Eye?

Putting Your Artistic Eye into Action

Bryan Peterson: After you've done the duct-tape camera exercise, you need to put that artistic eye into action. As you're driving down the road, look for potential. For example, you're looking past your hands to the windshield that's getting hammered by rain. The pedestrians are all blurry in the windshield as they cross the street against a beautiful traffic light that looks like out of focus colors."

Next time, get somebody else to drive and shoot the picture over their shoulder. There's no hesitation as to what lens you need to use because you're now visually speaking the language of what's in your camera bag.

Then, once you've done the exercise with a wide angle, do it with the telephoto. Wide angle lenses are used to convey a lot of information. A telephoto, on the other hand, goes into that same compositional arrangement of a wide angle shot and simply highlights the details of the shot. It brings everything closer.

It seduces you into thinking, "Well, I'll just sit here and have it brought up to me by zooming out," when, in fact, this is a horrible habit to get into. I want people to get in the habit of not only using the telephoto to bring objects closer, but to also walk towards that very object that they want to get closer to.

By doing this, you will quickly discover that the telephoto lens, more than any lens out there, has this amazing ability to knock out a background. Then it becomes a great exercise in discovering how a background is altered by distance.

If you have a 200mm lens on and you focus on your wife or husband who is standing 15 feet away from you, put them against the background like a hedge at a distance of about six feet. As you photograph them from 15 feet, now focus closer, and closer, and closer until you can't focus any more. Notice the background behind them becoming less and less defined.

Another good exercise is to pull the subject of your photo up further from the background so they're 20 feet in front of that hedge, and you go back a little bit as well. Now tell me what's happened to that background? At that point, the background is amazingly diffused into out of focus tones of green.

Backgrounds need to become a huge part of your visual attention, particularly when shooting a telephoto lens. If you don't pay attention to it, it's going to record noise. All of us can have a conversation in a crowded and noisy Starbucks and totally understand each other, and yet all around us is noise.

Photographically speaking, there's no on button relative to recording any sound but yet it will record position of what's going on behind us unless we pay attention to using the right lens to eliminate that noisy background. That's one thing, again, that most people really need to spend time and pay attention to. I've seen some great, great telephoto shots that, unfortunately, didn't achieve total greatness because they were competing with a noisy background.

In Summary

Once you know how to see through the eye of the lens (so to speak), how do you know what to do with it? It takes an artistic eye to create great shots, and it takes hard work to develop that eye. Bryan's exercises are a great place to start.