Shooting for purpose – Double-page spreads

If there’s one thing that will get you producing more purposeful pictures – or at least pictures with purpose – then it’s having an end result in mind as you begin to adjust the frame and juggle your composition.

Much of our photography, especially when we’re starting out can be a little aimless. We don’t think of it like that of course, we want to produce beautiful images and that’s probably the full extent of our  stated aim – if, indeed, we ever declare it at all. However, it’s an aim that struggles under the weight of its own vagueness and which doesn’t give us any direction.

Without constraints, without parameters, our images can be constructed in an infinite number of ways and that range of freedom can be so extensive that it actually becomes suffocating. There’s too much choice and we don’t know whether to shoot portrait or landscape format, wide or close, quick or slow, fixed or panned. It can become difficult to make a compositional choice because we’re worried about making the wrong one and missing the decisive viewpoint.

Here’s a selection of images taken, mostly, with a specific purpose in mind at the time of capture. These are all landscape format images that would be suitable to use across a double-page spread (DPS) in a magazine. Many have a single subject or single point that grabs your attention. It might be a human figure or a price label on a basket of mussels but most have a main subject. Many have space for text copy or at least an area of continuous tone that a designer could use to place some introductory text.

Shooting to purpose is very much an essential skill for anyone photographing on commission or shooting speculative material which they hope to market through an image library. And with constraints come freedom.

A recent commission for Vanity Fair magazine in Bali brought me a great deal of freedom in this respect. As you’d imagine for a prestigious publication with a certain style to maintain, their needs were very specific, which was tremendously liberating. With the help of their Picture and Supplement Editors, I was able to draw up a comprehensive list that really helped when it came to snapping frames: “No sunrises, no sunsets, no panning shots (Gulp! I’m sorry, do you know who you’re speaking to?), no models but faces with character, a front cover and a double-page spread”. These were just a few of the things that defined the style for the second, long list of subject matter.

Knowing that I needed to supply an image suitable for a front cover and another suitable for an introductory double-page spread gave some helpful definition and direction to my efforts. Knowing that these images would require space for copy and that they shouldn’t be cheesy lifestyle shots helped too. No shots from sunrise or sunset (although I still photographed then, for my own enjoyment), no blurred shots… it all helped. Not only did I rarely spend very long pondering on how to shoot a scene but that direction got me moving on to a new location as soon as I felt that I’d got “the” shot from where I was. I saw a lot more, shot a lot more and achieved a lot more than if I’d been shooting with my usual aimless and poorly-defined objectives.

You don’t have to be shooting for Vanity Fair to have direction. You can give yourself assignments that bring the constraints that will ultimately free you. Go and shoot a front cover image of your street and you’ll only be shooting in portrait format. Pick a space on your kitchen wall where you’d like to see  a triptych of colourful food shots and you’ll be thinking in primary colours, in close-up and with some kind of cohesive structure. It doesn’t really matter what constraints you employ; students at my workshops are often encouraged to spend two minutes shooting only red things or only circles or only from below the knee or from a wide-angle; the point is that by introducing limitations you give your poor, overworked brain a chance to focus.

What limitations do you find beneficial when you’re photographing?

Posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 5:08 pm. Filed under: Blog, My work RSS 2.0 feed.