For this cliche assignment, I of course used one of Vancouver's most prominent landmarks: the Lion's Gate Bridge. The first/top three pictures in the gallery are the cliche pictures, and the bottom/last three are the non-cliche ones. First off, I have the cliche of the bridge against the background of downtown Vancouver. The other standard cliche ones include one with a cruise ship passing underneath and a full-bridge black and white shot. I feel like these adequately meet the needs of a cliche photo, which almost made it hard to feel good about taking them. I've spent so much time trying not to take/post cliche photos on my own time that it just felt... wrong, to have these open in lightroom. However, it was incredibly easy to take these photos, in that you basically find a good viewpoint, point and shoot. Timing was needed just to allow people (or dogs, as these were taken from the Ambleside dog park) to get out of the frame, and a nice stroke of luck for the cruise ship to be passing underneath while I was out there. Although, It's easy to see why so many of these pictures are taken. They're still pretty to look at, no matter the cliche, and are nice tourist pictures. Most tourists would probably not want my dog as the focal point of the picture instead of the bridge they came to see. I tried to take the non-cliche photos in-between/while I shot the cliche ones, as once you got in the mode of shooting cliche ones it was very hard to snap out of it. It was like going from shooting for an amateur "places of B.C. calendar" to being the weirdo taking pictures from behind a tree. I do like all my non-cliche photos, with the focal points being focused on things other than the bridge: rocks, dog, tree. My favourite is the tree, as it takes away the beach/water aspect that it common to most of the "cliche" pictures you find of the bridge. Overall, I feel like this was a good exercise to do in the beginning of the year, to be able to really think about our photos and what makes them stand out. Something like this might be needed for portrait photography as well, since there's only so many "smile and fake laugh" pictures one can take before they all feel identical. Student flickr pages during a portrait unit should not strive to look like an amateur stock photography page.
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MoniqueRemember, the camera is your friend. Archives
February 2016
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