I posted this photo last week as my contribution to Aminus3’s photo prompt: minimal. I thought I might as well explain it here.
I like a number of things in this photos. Compositionally, here is why I took it:
I like the fact that the paws form a triangle. I love triangles in photos because they create structure, but not a boring symmetrical structure a square or rectangle would create. A triangle is always slightly imbalanced, slightly strange, out of place or incomplete, but still satisfying to our geometry-obsessed brain.
I also framed it so that the paws’ triangle is on a diagonal of the frame. And it just happened to be perpendicular to the diagonal of the tide marks. So you have big X shapes all across the frame.
Obviously, another thing that attracted me was the feather. I didn’t put it there, I suspect the wind did. Having it there, just outside the thirds rectangle and on the edge of the paws triangle creates a point of imbalance in an otherwise fairly geometric photo. And it creates a point of focus that feels slightly wrong and at the same time well placed in the middle of the frame height. Just enough to the side that it’s clear that it’s not the single subject of the photo. The fact that it’s pure white and everything else is gray makes it stick out even more.
There is also a symmetry between the right hand side paw mark and the feather. It’s ruined by the paw on the left and would be stronger if that paw mark didn’t exist. But that would be a very different image.
Finally, I liked the sand texture. That’s one thing I miss now that I live away from the coast: sand is very interesting because it’s not just one colour, it’s not just one kind of grain, not just one size of grain, not monochrome but not colour. It’s lots of things at the same time.
I like the fact that the photo raises questions. It doesn’t tell a story, but saws the seeds of one: why 3 paws and not 4? Whose dog was it? Was it chasing a bird? Are the paw marks and the feather related in any way? Was the dog alone? Do we even know if it was one dong only? What happened next?
#Photography #Analysis #Sand #Paws #Feather