Photograph A Line from Your Favorite Song

Posted by Zeke Kamm on 10/12/08 • Categorized as Feature Articles,Idea Idea - Thoughts? Comment Below

For me, photography is a medium for expressing ideas. It’s a language. It has its structure – the composition, it has its vocabulary – the technical aspects like exposure, depth of field, etc, and then it has the idea or meaning. Personally I feel like whatever language you are speaking, it’s just small talk unless there is meaning behind the words.

What is the meaning behind your photography?

It’s okay if you don’t have the answer right on the tip of your tongue. Maybe you’re still learning the language of photography. Just like English, I’m always trying to learn me it better.

Maybe you never thought about the idea or meaning part of the photographic language. Or maybe you are feeling a bit rusty in that area. Well, just like learning a new language or polishing up on your high school French, all you need to do is practice.

Here’s a fun exercise to try whenever you’d like to get your brain warmed up to the idea of communicating an idea with your photography.

Photograph a line from one of your favorite songs. Take a line from a song you like and interpret it any way you like into a single photograph. It can be a literal interpretation – where the song is about running and you take a photo of someone running for example, emotional – creating an image that shares the same feeling the line from the song gives you, or metaphorical – by really stretching your brainical you can use metaphors to convey the meaning or your interpretation of the line from your song of choice.

This is just an exercise, so there’s no need to spend a lot of time picking a song. It’s probably more important to put the time into thinking out the image. Plan it out in advance. Leave enough room for inspiration while you’re actually shooting the image, but don’t leave enough room that you only get crap if inspiration is stuck in traffic when you’re busy taking the photograph.

After you make your image put it up in the new Nice Photo Mag group on flickr here:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/nicephotomag/

Put the tag “Nice Song” and I’ll do my best to comment on all the photos.

I’ve just started the flickr group, so don’t let the echoing sound of emptiness scare you off.

Remember, this is an exercise. They don’t have to be magnificent works of art. As proof to that fact, I’m putting my example for the exercise. Can you figure out what the song line is?