Exercise 28 - Real and Implied Triangles

 Real triangles can be found very easily. These roofs in Lacock village appealed to me. Just a very small selection of those in the village:

 

Looking more closely at what’s around us we can find them in the strangest places. This macro image of a gloxinia shows the tip of the stamen to be wonderfully three sided

 

The first of my images making a triangle by perspective is of a redwood tree in ‘The Lost Gardens of Heligan’ – if you get the opportunity it’s an excellent place to visit. This triangle has its convergence at the top of the triangle.

 

I used a 10 mm wide angle lens to make the convergence more pronounced. I captured the image, getting very close to the base of the tree, so that the lower part stretched across the base of the image and the upper part of the trunk narrowed as much as possible. I composed the image so that the tree was symmetrical in the frame, to exaggerate the triangular shape. This lens has an excellent depth of field which lent itself to this shot. 

 

The next image has its convergence at the bottom of the triangle. It was taken at Stonehenge (obviously) early in the day, before the crowds arrived. I knew from the weather forecast that there would be significant cloud building during the morning, so I wanted to catch some and use Stonehenge as a minimal part of the image. I had a very tight period between the site opening and the rain starting.

Positioning myself so that I was directly in the path of the moving clouds and again using the 10 mm lens, I captured this image.

 

By holding the stones to the centre and in the bottom of the frame there is little distortion in that area. The main distortion from the 10 mm lens therefore takes part in the sky, tending to make it ‘zoom’ towards the centre of the frame, just above the stones. So now the focal point of the image is the triangular shape in the clouds, more than the archaeological site. The stones form the Bottom converging point of the triangle. The eye tends to move from the stones to the sky and back. Using the triangle of clouds makes the eye go easily to the stones at its convergence.

 

An hour later it was raining heavily, but I was comfortably dry in Salisbury Cathedral!

 

I really like these Inktense Pencils!

 

Implied triangles have been formed in the following images. 

 

The composition of this image took some time to create. Finding the right balance and right place in the garden, not to mention the objects to use, took much longer than I’d anticipated as they were rearranged.

 

This still life of garden tools has a triangle which converges at the top. The implied triangle makes a pleasing composition. The eye is drawn initially to the convergence of the two forks and the corner of the wheelbarrow. It is then allowed to travel around the image, but still constrained within the triangle, to observe the detail in the other parts.

 

The implied triangle extends past the objects in the image, but this is not a problem in the composition as the objects still form a pleasing shape.

 

The second still life was composed with the triangle converging at the bottom.

The Persian silver fishes were positioned so that they formed a triangle with the gold fish at the front central point. Again it took many changes to get the composition as I wanted.

 

Again the eye is drawn to the central point of the triangle – in this case it’s a different colour too, which helps. The size of the rear silver fish also pulls the attention, but not as much as the gold. The other fish are only looked at after the initial impact is made.

 

The image chosen for the ‘three people’ exercise was selected from many I took. I chose this because the triangular format was the most pleasing. Other images may have worked better – one with two parents looking up at their son clearly showed who wore the trousers and one with the parents looking down to their son showed how much they cared for him, but I feel that the arrangement I’ve chosen is a much more pleasing image.

 

For this image I think the relationship between the three doesn’t need to have any one of them taking a pole or subservient position. Each have their own, strong personalities and this arrangement allows them to come through.

 

The implied triangle is an angled isosceles with Mum at its apex, so I suppose that’s almost the pole position, but the overall image has a pleasing staggering of the subjects – the triangle just pulls them together.

 

I’ve been quite impressed by the way the implied triangles work in composing an image. I’ll have to be careful not to use it at the expense of other design elements.