March 2010 Archives

The Mighty Hercules: Medusa's Sceptre

I find it useful to consider how two mediums with overlapping interests, photography and animation, for example, approach the same topic - in this case, hand posing.

There's a classic animation hand pose used for graceful women that relaxes the hand and groups the middle two fingers together to clarify and simplify the silhouette.

It seems somewhat similar to how a ballerina holds her hands, with the exception that her fingers are not grouped.

Model photographer Mary DuPrie discuses these issues in some detail in her DVDs.

Hand Poses 07 by ~stockyourselfout on deviantART

Painters often create what they call a hierarchy of edges. Bright important edges are usually sharp, but darker, less important edges become lost edges.

This effect is easy enough to simulate in Photoshop, but I wonder how common it is. Most people use selective, luminance-based lens blur to simulate shallow depth of field. I'm talking about guiding the eye more in the painterly, less optics-based sense. This post is mainly about analyzing what painters do and incorporating those ideas into photography, although it is also interesting to see the efforts of artists who are approaching photographic ideas from the painterly side.

One could argue, I suppose, that creating a hierarchy of edges is only necessary for painters, and that photographers needn't worry about this issue (aside from DOF) because most of the edges are produced by the camera already suitably hard or soft. I'm not so sure about that. I think further manipulation might be warranted and beneficial.

UPDATE 3/8/2010

MM Forum Discussion