Exercise 4.

Exercise 4. Foresight and Abstracting (together!)

Take a cup and saucer. Study all its features, and tonality. How it makes you feel. What concepts it represents. Take notes on what you find interesting, and what impressions it makes on you.

Now, think about how you might abstract and convey the features that you've noted. Plan it out carefully. Sketching out your planned abstract is one idea for practicing foresight in this framework.

Now create the abstract photograph you have planned.

Notes: Include notes with your post. What were you trying to convey about the cup and saucer? Describe, and possibly include your plans in your post. And of course your final photograph.

Option. You may use a hard-boiled egg instead of (or in addition to) the cup and saucer.

Exercise 2. Parts 1 and 2 Described.

Exercise 2.

Part 1: Have someone (other than yourself) choose three seemingly unrelated items/objects for you to photograph together. Don't expect masterpieces, expect a struggle. Minimum requirement: 20 pictures.

Part 2: Pick up your camera, a 35-50mm lens, and your tripod, and go to the front (or back) door of your home. Take 19 steps. Mark the spot. Take seven more steps from that point. The seven steps from your original 19 mark the radius of a circle, in which you should shoot at least 20 images. You should feel desperation during the exercise. You will only start to make visual break throughs when you have run out of the obvious picture possibilities.

Exercise 3. Get Inspired

Assignment 3: Get Inspired.

Find a picture in the FP book (it can be any part of the book) that inspires you with his vision, creativity, and technique.

Part 1. In your blog, tell us the page # and picture. Describe to us what you like about it, how it makes you feel.

Part 2. Take some pictures using the style or technique or aspects of vision used in the FP shot. Post it in your blog and describe in words what features or parts of the technique you used to produce that picture. Make it as much your own as FP's, but tell us what you started to do and how you learned and changed it.

Don't worry if it's not "great"! I want to do this exercise AGAIN when we finish the book. Actually, I had thought about doing this before we started, but I thought we should at least do a few exercises first. Again, please do #1 and #2 BEFORE #3.

LASTLY: It's important that everyone share each others experiences, so please look at all other members blogs and try to at least leave a comment either about the technique or even one of simple encouragement!

Freeman Patterson Team Blog

As suggested by Paul (GeneralE), I have created this Team Blog that we can all post to (please be patient as I add each of you as members).

This is to be used to publish our "summary/conclusions" after each exercise. Other uses to be determined later and/or as discussed in the DPC thread.