These abstract photography tips set out some guiding principles to help you shoot the best abstract images you can. This particuliar type of photography is an interesting discipline. On the one hand it’s all about stripping things back to their essentials and beyond, but on the other there’s an almost heightened need to tell a story and pay attention to aesthetics.
Tip #1–Think About What Abstract Photography Really Is
Start by stepping away from the camera and spending a little time thinking clearly about what abstract photography really is. At its most basic, abstract images are all about rendering the familiar in unfamiliar ways, seeing and emphaszing underlying patterns and contrasts, and shocking the eye with a new view.
Tip #2–Emphasis Form
One of the fundamental components of an abstract image is the forms contained within it. Think carefully about how you are going to emphasis the form of whatever it is you’re shooting. Pay attention to lines and curves, and look for ways to really foreground those aspects in your shot.
Tip #3–Emphasize Color
The second basic component of an abstract image is often color – even if those colors are somewhere on the spectrum between black and white. Keep an eye out for interesting color schemes and try to bring them out in your shots. If you think about it, when you’re removing so much of the visual information that most images carry with them (who is that person, where are they walking – and so on), one of the few things that’s left is – how do those tones work together, are they beautiful or bland?
Tip #4– Find a New Viewpoint
Perhaps one of the most important tips is to find a new viewpoint. And why is this so important, you might ask? Well it’s all about what makes an abstract image ‘abstract.’ Remember that if you include too much of the usual context and information in your image, it won’t really be abstract at all! So think about getting in really close, maybe with a macro lens, or how about photographing the edges of two objects and the gap between them, rather than fitting either of them completely into the image frame. Choices like these will help you extract the form and color of the scenes you shoot, from the context that the human brain inevitably brings.
Bringing It All Together
To wrap up this collection of abstract photography tips, we’ll just leave you with one thought – when you take away ‘meaning’ in the literal sense from your images, what’s left inside the image frame is ‘abstract’ – so you have to focus on making the stuff that’s left work even harder than usual. Some thoughts on image composition will also help you achieve the look you want.
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