Geometry in Photography

I was so inspired by Cee’s no 19 Compose Yourself I thought I’d be brave and have a go myself. I began by going through my photo archives to see what I had hidden away. Unsurprisingly the first photographs which caught my eye were all ‘man-made’ with lots of triangles, squares, rectangles and straight lines. A reflection I guess of the earliest geometric principles of angles, length, volume, and areas  – all essential elements of construction and surveying.

As I scrolled through more recent albums I found myself looking for geometric shapes which were less obvious or made me think of geometric patterns.

After a few days of playing around in my archives I decided it was time to go out with the camera. These are a few of what I took.

What did I learn? A few things . . .firstly so many of my photographs are lessons in geometry. I found shapes everywhere I looked in the archives, even the ones of pigs! I mean just look how many triangles she is made up of. Cee is right;

Our minds are geared to recognize shapes, wired that way at the deepest level.  When we can recognize shapes and see them balanced on the page, we feel good about the image, even if this happens at such a deep subconscious level that we aren’t aware of the analysis going on internally.

or perhaps I just thought the pig was cute?! Black Winged Stilts are certainly geometric. Every time we went out after Cee’s post I found myself photographing them. I thought though six photographs of stilts might not be exactly what Cee was looking for, but hopefully she won’t mind two.

What did surprise me was that if I went out with the sole aim of taking photographs of geometric shapes I lost some of my spontaneity when out with the camera (apart from the Black Winged Stilts!). I fared far better when I kept the ‘geometric thoughts’ at the back of my mind. It was this approach that led to my favourite photographs for this challenge.

I was focused on taking a photograph of the boys, when suddenly the only thing I could see through the viewfinder was shapes and angles, I could even see Chris and Cee’s lines in the frame. Quite unexpected but also quite amazing. So thank you both, this has been great fun and also stretching.