Elements of design assignment 2: Curved lines

Image 16: Natural style garden

Lens 18-70mm at 18mm: Iso 160 f7.1 at 1/160th

A part of the gardens at Loseley House was planted in a naturalistic way with larger plants surrounded by broad sweeps of small flowers. This seemed an opportunity to try and capture an interesting photograph of a complex scene.

Such photographs are the mainstay of many articles in the English Gardens magazine. I also was inspired by three photographs by Marianne Marjerus that I saw at Kew Gardens Exhibition: "Layered landscape" which was one of the winners of the International Garden Photograph of the Year 2010. The two other photographs by her were also finalists: "Morning Light" and "Stipa gigantica...." . The structure of the visual elements in this type of photograph is not obvious at first and I returned to these photographs a few times to try and understand the composition.

I selected the above photograph from several I that took of the flower beds. I hope that the viewer follows the sweep of small white flowers that starts in the foreground and forms a diagonal across the frame and finally curves behind a larger green plant. I adjusted the cropping of the original photograph to attract the eye to follow this shape. From the right hand side of the frame, I cropped out another area of white flowers which attracted the eye around to the right of the larger green plant without crossing the frame. I also cropped some bushes and shrubs from the top of the original frame which drew attention away from the curve of white behind the larger plant in the centre right.

Image 17: Formal style garden

Lens 18-70mm at 18mm: Iso 160 f 7.1 at 1/160th

In contrast to the natural style of planting in the previous picture, there is also an area of formal style flower beds at Loseley. In this photograph, I took advantage of a sunny spell to photograph a curved pathway edged by conical shaped bushes. I set the lens to wide angle to emphasize the sweep of the pathway and the v-shape of the flower bed.

The clean cut lines of the path and the shadows results in a photograph which has strong visual elements. However, to my mind the shape is not sufficiently interesting to make a compelling image. The eye follows the path to the top right of the frame, but there is nothing of interest at that point. The eye therefore roams down the right hand side of the frame and back across the foreground looking for points of interest, without finding anything. The curving shape in this case is not sufficient to sustain the viewers interest.

Image 18: Curvaceous leaves

Lens 18-70mm at 70mm: Iso 800 f 16 at 1/30th (tripod)

I photographed the leaves of this large succulent or cactus in the temperate greenhouse at RHS Wisley. The leaves are about 1 metre across and the plant was growing on the side of a rock wall so that the leaves were almost vertical. This allowed reflected sunlight to reveal the edges and curvaceous form of the leaves.

In this photograph, unlike the previous one, it is the curved shapes and tones of the leaves that attract the eye to wander up and down and around the photograph.

I needed to use the narrowest field of view with the lens at full zoom in order to fill the frame with the plant leaves. I just cropped out a narrow strip from the top and side of the original photograph to remove some remaining distractions.