Exercise 15 Positioning a Single Point

This is the first exercise in the second section of the course. Elements of design contains the study of point, lines, curves, pattern and shapes. In this exercise, I need to first jot down as many types of situation that would make a clear photograph of a point.

So this is what I think: 

First of all the background has to be plain, or blur (such as boken using large aperture) to avoid distraction. Then my subject has to be a singular (since we are talking about ONE point). In order to achieve that, I want either only one item on the frame, or one item with very bright colour, the rest with dull colour or simply blurry. It is also possible to use spot light to isolate the one subject out of many similar item in the background, but I am no good with lighting so it won't be easy for me to create that.

  

The second part of the exercise involves positioning a point on the image. The first shot involve setting some sort of studio at home. The background is some postal wrapping paper on sale in Reyman at GBP 1.69 a roll. The main light is a remote control SB-600. It is kind of harsh lighting that I should use some sort of reflector to bounce it next time. It looks okay here because there is a lot of space and hard shadow fills some of those emptiness.

It should be no brainer that this is indeed a point (only one small jam in front of plain background).

Image 1: 50mm f/11 ISO 400 at 1/100s

The next image I want to get some brighter colour object that stands out in front of some boring background. I see this post at Charing Cross. Bright yellow stands out of dark green. I use large aperture to make the background more blurry.

Image 2: 50mm f/1.8 ISO 400 at 1/500s

So far I have the tendency to put the point on lower right portion of the frame. Not sure why, but the left side looks less natural to me. Positioning on upper part of the frame makes to top too heavy and the image looks like it is going to flip. The next shot I want to have a bigger point that occupying more of the frame. I want to subject to have some texture rather than a boring yellow ball, but I don't want it too be too interesting and the minor detail takes over. So this is roughly okay:

Image 3: 50mm f/5.6 ISO 400 at 1/500s

It is not hard to picture a point, but I find it hard to balance to image if there is only one thing in the picture. Some of the shots look somewhat artificial to me. Oh well.