Abstract Photography Tips
Get the most out of abstract photography with abstract photography tips
Instead of representing the landscape, a very different approach is to use carefully
selected parts of it to construct personal images that rely on purely graphic qualities.
In all art, there is tension between subject and expression and in photography more
than any other graphic art, subject tends to dominate. Abstraction is an attempt
to liberate shape, line, tone and colour from the subject. It relies heavily on
being able to find some aspect of a landscape — whether that is the way light falls
on it, an arrangement of colours, or a viewpoint that is lacking in the usual references
of perspective, modelling or recognisability. .
Abstract or Extract? Ansel Adams disliked the term ‘abstract’, and preferred
‘extract’ to emphasize the fact that photographers are choosing from what exists
in front of them. He added that, as far as composition was concerned, ‘I think in
terms of creating configurations out of chaos, rather than following any conventional
rules...’. Edward Weston, a friend of Adams, worked even harder at emphasizing the
graphic features of an image, saying, ‘composition is the strongest way of seeing’.
Without splitting hairs on definition, abstracting shape, line and colour from a
landscape has an honourable history, going back to painters such as Corot, who prefigured
Cubism by analyzing and emphasizing the planes of rocks and the land.
Abstract photography tips and techniques It is certainly a way of seeing,
and, if done well, it reveals aspects of a scene that most other people would not
have thought of. You are always limited by the realism of the subject, unless you
elect to do serious retouching in the image-editing stage, but one or more of the
following techniques will usually help to abstract an image:
1. Crop out the obvious references, such as a horizon or anything immediately
recognizable and commonplace. Cropping in this sense means working the zoom or moving
the camera.
2. Angle the camera to fit lines and shapes more interestingly into the picture
frame.
3. Choose subject matter that itself contains clean lines, such as rocks,
snow, or sand.
4. Work at the two extremes of contrast — on the one hand, images with very
subtle variations in tone, such as distant views in haze, or mist; on the other
hand, scenes that are divided between deep shadow and intense highlight, as in silhouettes,
or objects against pure snow. These extremes can be exaggerated with the in-camera
settings, and even more so during image editing.
5. Work at the two extremes of saturation, in a similar way to 4 above, On
the one hand, delicate, pastel hues throughout; on the other, intense differences
between hues.
6. Look for scenes in which two or three solid colours dominate, and crop
in on those.
7. Look for scenes in which there are very few directions of line, such as
rows of planted crops but cropped right in on these.
8. Look out for regular patterns, such as drying cracks in mud, or ripples
in sand.