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Useful Photography Tip

Useful Photography Tip #140: A Simple Exercise to Get You Seeing The World in Shapes

Chris Gampat
No Comments
05/10/2015
1 Min read
Kodak Tri-X 400
Kodak Tri-X 400

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Many street and landscape photographers try to see and photograph the world in terms of shapes. If you think that seeing the world in black and white is tough enough, then seeing shapes in the way that they do can be even tougher–but here’s a great exercise to try out. It’s designed to help you figure out the shapes in the world.

Take four of your images and physically print them out. Get away from a screen of any sort and make black and white prints of these images. Then take one of your images and on a separate sheet of paper draw out the geometric lines that you see in the same way. Want to make it easier? Use transparent sketch paper and with the sketch paper over the image begin to sketch the lines out that you see underneath. Think of it as a grid overlay but instead you’re adding more lines in.

Continue to do this with each photo.

When you’re all done with the sketches, take them and study the lines. Then walk around and look for places and scenes with similar line establishments. You’ll begin to see that you’ll start to think and physically see more in terms of geometry.

Give this a shot before you seriously take your next set of images and you’ll see how you’ll start to see and think differently.

black and white geometry lines photo print shapes
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Chris Gampat

Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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