Photography in the Streets

"Photography is a language," our photography expert, Maurizio Zanella, tells us. If photography is a language, then I must not speak it as well as I thought.

Yesterday our group met up with Maurizio in Temple Bar to work on some photography exercises. He gave us a handful of assignments with which we were to practice the skills and techniques we learned the day before in lecture, such as aperture, shutter speed, ISO, rule of thirds, leading lines, diagonals and triangles. The point of these assignments were to get us comfortable with using the rules of composition. It was quite challenging.

My attempt to use leading lines and diagonals.

From a young age, I have always been verbally artistic rather than visually artistic. I'm much better with words than I am with art. I don't do well when I'm forced to be creative. Inspiration has to come to me in order for me to do anything remotely creative. I can't force it. Maurizio kept encouraging us to be creative with our photography and in the way we implemented composition, but nothing was coming to me while we were doing the assignments. As a person who sometimes gets easily frustrated when they can't do something right away, I was getting discouraged.

A picture I took to exhibit contrast.

Many people believe that photography and taking pictures are easy. It's just the click of a button, right? Wrong. There's so much more to it that most people don't realize. You have to consider lighting, position, composition, depth of field, etc. While the point of the day was to practice techniques, I think it is safe to say I am not cut out to be a professional photographer. I certainly have even more respect for photographers now.

A fun alley called Love Lane that I stumbled upon while photographing the streets.