Real and Impled Triangles

REAL

It is not surprising that most, if not all, triangles occur in man made structures. I found that they tend to occur in similar types of building i.e. those in the 'classical' style. The  image above is of a pediment that is part of a much larger structure.

The eye is inevitably drawn towards top of the image because of the bright sky but also because the brickwork appears to spiral towards that point. The photograph was taken within an old kiln that was built in the ruins of a monastery. I am not sure that it truly qualifies as an image for the exercise.  I tend to think of perspective as being of straight lines  where the effect is created by the distance between the camera and the furthest point of the image.

In this image the effect of perspective is more obvious because we assume that the columns and arches are all of the same size throughout the picture. The figure at the far point gives us some sense of the distance between the camera and the furthest point of the image and helps confirm our view about the size of the arches because no-one is that small in our experience.

IMPLIED

I carried out this exercise as required but I am still uncertain why. There is an implied triangle created by the placement of the objects and the inversion of the triangle creates a different tension within the image (the inverted triangle appears less stable).  In order to show that I had actually taken two photographs (instead of 'flipping' the first image) I re-arranged the jars. Interestingly in the inverted triangle there are now a number of more obvious smaller triangles (e.g the three orange tops and the bottom three jars).

I had taken a number of photographs of this small go-kart track but waited to see if the natural flow of the race would produce a triangular group. This image is the result.

Comment

We are asked the question in the narrative on page 71 "Why bother at all". The question is answered "a definable shape organises parts of a picture, and one of the fundamentals of design is to provide structure to an image." The series of exercises in this part of the Course have shown this to be true but that is only to be expected given that this is why they were included to do exactly that.

However I felt that in some cases the structures were contrived to fit a theory. On page 70 the image of the three figures only have a triangular relationship because of the super-imposed triangle. Looking beyond this the image is of the man on the left, separated from the other two. There is the physical gap and the position of his body turned slightly away and the eye line that is looking away and out of the picture that, to me, isolates him.

I found when I was going through my library of photographs that I was too often imposing a structure that really was not there. 

In answering the question "Why bother at all" the answer is probably is "because it can be, in a limited number of circumstances, a powerful tool in the photographers armoury." As the author says "the idea of structuring an image in a simple graphic arrangement is principally professional."