Hi I'm Doug McKinlay, and you're watching AdoramaTV.
For today's episode we're going to do another
photographic exercise.
I can't stress how important these are to
help stay sharp, and keep your skills honed.
I do these often myself when I've got some downtime
or a few hours to kill.
So the exercise we're going to do today
is the 'Mixing Bowl' exercise.
Now, we're in Central London so I didn't
really want to bring a mixing bowl all the way
up to the middle of town with me
so we're going to have the Mixing Hat.
Now all it is is a receptacle to hold the ideas
that we're going to cut up into strips and stick in there.
First things first, we're going to need to grab
some paper, just a standard A4 8x10 piece of paper,
a pair of scissors and a pen.
All we're going to do is, we're going to
write our ideas onto the paper, cut it into strips
and drop them into the hat.
Then we'll choose one of those topics
and we'll explore that photographically.
Whatever you write on your pieces of paper can be
as diverse as your imagination.
For instance, on my pieces of paper
I'm writing things like color, sound, signs,
panning, circle.
It doesn't really matter what you put on
the piece of paper as long as you can
photographically illustrate it.
In order for this photographic exercise
to really take hold, you need to
think a little bit outside the box.
You need to bring all your photographing skills
to bare, in fact, that's the point.
We're going to have time today to do all
the subjects but we'll pick one or two or three perhaps
and see what we get.
So we've got our subjects in the hat,
we've mixed them up and now I'm going to
grab a few of them.
First one is 'Color.'
Always a good one.
Next one is 'Sound.'
That will be interesting.
How do we do that photographically?
Let's look at the last one,
'Signs.'
Good one,
Central London has tons and tons of different
kinds of signs.
So now it's up to us to take those subjects,
get out into the city and photographically
explore what they mean.
Our first topic is Sound and this is a fantastic topic
for photographs.
How do we show sound in a stills photograph?
Well, off the top of my head there's a couple things
I'm thinking of;
men working, that's always a good one.
It could be jackhammers, it could be people ripping up
the roads, anything really, groups of people talking.
Places like London has lots of tourists, lots of
people talking.
The other one I'm thinking about,
it could be of the vehicle mufflers.
All that diesel fumes coming out of
the back of black taxis, buses or trucks, or whatever.
You just got to think laterally with all of these things.
The next one I'm looking at is Color.
Color is a fantastic topic as well
because there's so much of it, especially in the city.
I don't mean just some random shot of blue or red,
I'm thinking shapes, how it's interacting with
the environment around it.
Again, it's a really good exercise for
getting your brain cells working.
The last one I'm looking at is Signs.
In this city there's thousands of signs.
I don't just mean some street sign but
something interesting, not just the road sign.
You really want to have a good search around
in the area you're at to find something that's
maybe a little funny, maybe a little bit different.
So that's it for the Mixing Bowl exercise,
sans mixing bowl of course.
Thanks for watching.
I'm Doug McKinlay for AdoramaTV.
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