The Art of Patterns part 1

Artistic photography from your own back yard

Blogged by: Saumil Shah

Patterns occuring in nature make for extremely artistic photos. And for seeking out patterns you do not need to travel to the far corners of the Earth. It would be great if I got the opportunity to fly over the Sahara and photograph the uniform ripples in the sand dunes, but looking at objects closely in my own back yard can bring out quite a few beautiful subjects!

Nature is always aesthetic and therefore photographing objects occuring in nature will almost always lend themselves to be pleasing to the eye. What makes a beautiful artistic photograph depends on how you compose the photograph, how the subject is illuminated and some basic camera settings.

Let us see a few examples. The photograph below is a close up of a palm leaf. I have chosen to capture only a small section of the palm plant. What is left out is as important as what is captured. I do not want the viewer to think about anything other than the beautiful symmetry of the fronds of the palm leaf. These fronds remind me of calligraphic strokes. Simple, straight and uniform.

I spent a couple of minutes properly composing this photograph. The photograph is based on the famous Rule of Thirds. The spine of the leaf forms a graceful curve beginning from about 1/3rd photo height down from the top left corner and ending almost near the bottom right corner. The curve divides the photograph into two regions. The top region is filled with dense green strokes formed by the fronds. The eye of the observer is led from the bottom right corner to the top left part of the photograph. The bottom region could have been empty but I chose to zoom in on this particular area of the palm plant where I could fill up part of the bottom region with tips of fronds from another palm leaf below this one. The aperture is set to f/5.6 which gives an average shallow depth of field, conveniently blurring out the background.

Last but not the least, I chose to illuminate the subject in the best possible manner. Leaves and flowers are translucent. Having the sun or the light source shine through them makes their colours vivid and bright. The risk here is that you would be taking photographs either against the sun or in blazing sunlight which may cause problems in exposure. These can be avoided by careful positioning. If you cannot change the orientation of the subject, simply walk around it until you get an angle you like. In the photograph above, the light shining through the palm fronds gives them a bright green colour.

Let us see how you analyse the next photograph. The subject in the photo below is the same palm plant, photographed from a different angle.

Continue onwards for my thoughts behind taking this photograph and see whether your observation is in line with mine. It doesn’t have to be, though.

For the second photograph, the Rule of Thirds is applied by dividing the photo into three columns. The curve formed by the spine extends from the bottom edge, 1/3rd of the width from the left all the way to the top edge, 2/3rd of the width from the left. The right hand side column is taken up by another palm leaf. The center sail shaped section is thinly filled with the edges of the fronds in graceful curved strokes. As you can see, I adore symmetry and natural curves (no pun intended).

As with the previous example, the light is shining through the fronds. I was squatting on the ground while taking this picture. The afternoon sun was just right and I had to use my hand to make a small shade on top of my lens to avoid lens flares. I also chose to sit a little further from the plant and use a zoom lens with 300mm zoom to close in on the fronds. The zoom, coupled with the f/5.6 aperture makes for a nice blurry background. I like choosing a dark background and leaving it out of focus, directing all attention to the close up subject in the foreground.

In part 2 of The Art of Patterns, we shall look at more patterns in nature from my afternoon stroll. I shall confess, these palm plants were not in my own back yard, but at the garden at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, where I was participating in a workshop on Calligraphy.

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