Do you pay attention which side is your model facing in photos? And do you think this is important for the message? According to a recent study, it is. Simone Schnall, Director of the Cambridge Embodied Cognition and Emotion Laboratory, says in her report that the subject should be facing right. If we want to portray a person as dynamic, progressive, positive and forward-thinking, we ought to portray them looking right. But why is this so, and how can we apply it?
These 50+ movie color palettes show how to effectively use color in film
Considering cinema’s origin in black and white, it’s not surprising that many filmmakers have an obsession with color in films. From wardrobe choices and color gels to post-production filters and fonts, movie color schemes play a vital role in a director’s vision.
How to set the tone and tell stories with geometric shapes
Most photographers know of the aesthetically pleasing qualities of certain geometric shapes and patterns. There’s all kinds of “rules” based around them. Triangles are a common compositional tool, as are squares for the “frame within a frame”. Whether we choose to follow those rules or not is down to each individual. But is there more to it than just making things visually appealing?
This interesting short video from Now You See It dissects the shapes found in several animated and live action movie characters. It looks a little deeper at the psychology of shapes, and how they can change our mood and feeling about a character before they’ve even said a word. While the video does pertain primarily to movies, the theory can hold with still photographs, too.
Portraits are as much about psychology as they are about equipment
As more and more of our clients are becoming familiar with being in front of the camera (Thanks, Facebook!), people today tend to present themselves the way they want the world to see them, rather than as the people they actually are.
In this video, photographer Sean Tucker talks about the difference between simply taking somebody’s picture, and making a portrait, as well as some tips on how to get it.
Selfiology: the Story of the Selfie
More than once I have succumbed to the pressure to be in one and together with me, only few have been able to escape the phenomenon of the selfie.
Selfies seem to have become just another part of life. Over time the wonderment about people striking the strangest of poses in front of their telephones has vanished. Younger generations will even find themselves in selfies that exceed their memory. We have simply learned to see upon the selfie as a part of modern day society and the debate surrounding it slowly fades away.
Test Your Attention Capacity With Skoda’s New Commercial
If you’ve seen the invisible gorilla experiment you already know how oblivious to details we can be, even when something is right in front of us.
A brilliant new video commercial by the Czech car manufacturer uses the same principals of selective attention and seems to work even on people who know what they’re watching.
Photographers deal with including (or excluding) details on a daily basis. This leads many to believe they have an exceptional ability to notice details that others don’t.
It’s time to test just how attentive you really are.
How Would You Redefine Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs For Photographers?
This Pyramid is probably every psychology student nightmare. It illustrates Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which explains what do people really want. The (overly simplified here) idea behind the Pyramid is that you can only tent to a higher layer after you have dealt with satisfying the need of all the layers underneath it.
But how would this transform to photography? I have my idea of course, but I would love putting this here and hear your ideas. Share with us in the comments.
New Study Highlights Just How Misleading One Profile Picture Can Be
Back when social media was still something establishing its foundations, things were a bit different. People didn’t care what they typed as comments on MySpace, or how many seizures they’d cause others to have from their profile’s flashing black-and-white Fall Out Boy skin(face it: that was why we all learned HTML in the first place.) Where once profile pictures were something you’d only expect high school kids to worry about, things have changed today.
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