P#21 Q5A: What Spaghetti Can Teach You About Your Photographic Frame

As the Spaghetti Falls

Bryan Peterson: A background in design is not required in order to become a good photographer. In Learning to See Creatively, I talk about that a great deal.

My answer to this question is very simple and it is something that will lead you down a road that will completely open you up to things that you never envisioned before.

I would suggest that you get a package of spaghetti. I want you to take this uncooked package of spaghetti and find a table to work on. Get a moderately large piece of poster board to act as the photographic frame, like 2x2 or 2x3 piece, and simply stand the spaghetti up in the middle of board and let go of it.

Just let the spaghetti fall where it falls. Then I want you to get right over the top of this spaghetti with your camera and look down at the spaghetti, making certain that the edges of your photographic frame do not allow the spaghetti to come to a stop.

I don't want you to back away to the point where we see the pile of spaghetti and the area beyond the perimeter of the white poster board. Instead, I want you to be inside of that, where the edges of the frame are showing the spaghetti leaving the photographic frame. We will know by looking at that it that the spaghetti goes on beyond the frame's edges.

I want you to make several compositions of the spaghetti. You will discover the power of line in doing that. As you turn your body a little to the left, a little to the right, those lines that you're photographing inside that photographic frame will also change their message. This is important to know.

You may see horizontal lines depending upon your point of view. You'll have a picture of what we call calm and tranquil spaghetti. If you move ninety degrees, you'll have vertical lines of spaghetti and you'll have spaghetti that's very strong and dignified. If you run it at a forty-five degree angle as you look down, you'll have spaghetti filled with movement and speed.

Bryan Peterson: Another exercise that introduces an element of design involves shape and color. Take a small cherry tomato and place it where you thinks it looks best weighted in the picture of spaghetti lines from the previous exercise.

You might end up putting it in the upper left-hand part of the frame or the lower right-hand part of the frame -- the choice is yours. You could even put it right in the middle.

When people look at those two images they will react in the same way. They're going to go, "Oh, is that spaghetti?" but the first reaction is, "Ooh," and one with the tomato, it's like, "Wow." Then it's followed with, "Is that just spaghetti and a cherry tomato?"

You say, "Yeah."

"Oh, you are creative, girl. You've got it going on."

The fact of the matter is you could repeat this exercise with so many other objects that you could easily find around your house. You could take a bag of potato chips and dump them on a white poster board, and shoot straight down on them. Then if you so choose, you could take something out of the mustard jar, just a tablespoon of mustard and literally just put a little dollop on top of one of the chips.

Now you've introduced color, but it's composed in a way that it creates balance in what is normally seen as somewhat of a chaotic photograph. The tension is all of the mounds of potato chips and their respective curvilinear lines. Then you have an anchor, that being a dollop of mustard that you place on one of the chips.

In Closing

Do you need a background in design to see creatively through your photographic frame? Absolutely not. According to Bryan Peterson, there are exercises to help you do just that. This one, using poster board to outline your photographic frame, is just one of the ways to do it.