Viewpoint

I chose ‘workshop’ as a theme for this exercise, more specifically ‘expressive art journalling’. I run art journalling workshops in the community and their focus is on experimenting with new materials and techniques to facilitate self-expression. I chose a variety of mediums and tools and arranged them on a table.


Looking at the arrangement I took a number of photographs from different viewpoints. I have included some of the better ones below:

The final image above is of thumbnail sketches from different viewpoints. Some of the other viewpoints I had tried for the arrangement did not work, e.g. aerial views. From above it was not possible to see the coloured surfaces of the objects that would play an important role in the illustration of ‘expressive’. Possibly I could have turned the objects on their sides for aerial shots but roling around would have been a problem and it wouldn’t give the same depth of field. Because I had selected objects of different heights there emerged a natural ‘front’ and ‘back’ when arranging them. This meant that ‘views’ of the back were not very good for showing range of media.


The landscape format turned out to be the best for this arrangement, although the portrait format could have worked if the items had been arranged closer together. It was better than the long or square formats for showing the variety of heights of the items which was key to the illustration working.