Exercise 17: Multiple Points

In this exercise, I am supposed to construct a screen starting with one point and gradually add more object in. I set up the remote flash on the side and fired at about 45 degrees angle to the subject. I try to put a piece of white cloth in front of the flash to soften the light, but it just doesn't seem to be any softer. Maybe next time I should try bounce it off from opposite direction. 

So we start with one big bowl of tomato. I want this to be my central subject, so I want it to be bigger to begin with.

The screen is quite empty, so let's put some small ones in the empty space. I put them in lower left corner to be some balance on the image.

Keep putting more on the empty space on the screen. Now I got something like a triangle dynamic. The big bowl still dominate the screen.

Instead of triangle, I want to move it a little bit to form a square. As it turns out, perfect square is not too interesting visually. 

So maybe a tighter circle around the bowl looks better?

With this construction, I move thing around just to see if other configuration looks any better. So let's say I want a diagonal line.

So wired with round tomato. The un-natural line extension is taking the focus away from the bowl.

Let's try the triangle again with different amount of tomato. 

It still looks fine as long as the sides are not too heavy to take away the weight on the bowl. 

I just have a feeling that even though I use remote flash instead of on-camera flash. The light source is just too small and it is why I see a white spot on the tomatos. A single piece of clothes is not enough to diffuse the light, so I think bounce flash might work better. I should also plan for a reflector next time so that the tomato is not so dark on one side. 

Maybe I should get a book on still life photography...