An Eye On The Prize
I am back from vacation in the snowy north and fully recharged. I am going to begin a new feature on the blog by doing a critique on a photo from the A Little News Pool and Richard Hamm is my first victim. Richard is a college student, prime target audience for this blog and I asked him if he minded being first. He graciously agreed so here we go. By the way, the rest of you may not be so lucky. I may just nab your photo and slice it up without telling you! HA!
Actually, there is very little slicing to do on this photo. Richard is the photo editor for The Red and Black, the student produced newspaper at the University of Georgia. There are a few things I want to highlight in this photo because they showcase excellent visual thinking. The first thing that Richard did that is excellent, especially in one so young!!, is he previsualized the shot. To do a photo like this you have to see it in your head, or at least see it somewhere else and apply the technique to your own work. You will notice the excellent use of the track’s lighting to add depth to the image. This is another aspect of seeing. The track’s lighting provides a sense of the scale of the track that would be missing if the back corner were dark. Richard saw this and took advantage of it.
Another of the very nice touch is the serpentine nature of the race course which gives us the nice little wiggle in the trailing lights. Finally, and this can’t be overstated, Richard used the right lens for the job. The photo has enough compression to hold together evidencing the use of at least a short telephoto, in this case a 70 mm. A wide shot of this would fall apart and the light trail would diminish too much to be of any visual use. The longer lens slightly compresses the foreground/background relationship and holds the image together. All in all, a very nice job of photojournalism. You can see more of Richard’s work plus his portfolio at www.rahphoto.wordpress.com
Photo copyright Richard Hamm. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer or of Richard Hamm.
