Christmas is Coming into the Foreground!

Hello Polaroiders, it’s been too long! So, let’s jump right into this instalment of In Search of the Perfect Polaroid!

Well, seeing as it’s Halloween, I thought I’d use a picture taken last… Christmas:

Look closely at the picture; what’s special about it? Okay, a lot’s special about it, because every Polaroid is special. Like snowflakes. Hmm. There is an all too cliche but still maybe beautiful blog post in there. We’ll see. Anyway, look at the walls in the picture. How many do you see? Well, there are actually quite a few since it’s a very angular house, but there are three main ones. Layers. You see them? First, the wall with the door against it, that features the Felt Christmas Tree Calendar of Impatience. Got it? Good. Second, the wall that is attached to the main brown doorframe; from the left, it’s about a quarter of the way into the picture. Alright, ready for the third one? Squint, peak across the hallway and into the other room. See those boxes, underneath a mirror? These items are against the third wall. So! What does this mean? Well, think about it. Those three walls, what was the difference between them? Yes…? We moved further back into the house, and therefore into the picture, as we went from 1 to 3! So. That might have seen like a really drawn out exercise to pick out walls, but I think this picture is a really good demonstration of, you guessed it, foreground, mid-ground, and background!

That brings us to Today’s Tip: establish clear layers of a scene. Polaroids, we love them, but they are sometimes a little blurry and difficult to understand. Now, that fuzzy-factor is often what makes a Polaroid so cool, but you know, you want to be able to see something going on. Establishing a foreground, mid-ground and background does just this: clarifies the zones within your photo, making it easier to decipher the scene as a whole. So, when you’re setting up your picture, make sure you’ve got at least two layers to add this depth that I’m talking about, and chances are, one of these layers will turn out okay. Because you never know with Polaroids, they can be a little moody. (I get it though, I’ve been there.)

Now, go establish some foregrounds and backgrounds and mid-grounds and side grounds or really no grounds at all if you want to go super abstract, because those photos can turn out pretty unreal too, but at least always be aware of the depth in your photo. It’s likely that there are layers, even if your subject is really close-up; understanding where these layers are helps to find new details within the picture as a whole.

Happy Halloween and Merry Christmas!:) And good luck snapping your layered Polaroids!

RJ

My Take On The F Word…

Hi:)

Okay, so, a while ago I went to see Michael Dowse’s The F Word a.k.a What If (2013), and to be brutally honest, I loved it.

There are so many things I could blog about regarding this Irish-Canadian romantic comedy starring Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan, but I’m going to focus on one: that little fairy-butterfly thing flying around the screen the entire movie.

For those of you who haven’t seen the film yet, I’ll give you a recap of the scene where the fairy is introduced: Chantry gives Wallace her number, which happens to be on the back of a little anime sketch of a girl that looks suspiciously like Chantry herself. When Wallace finds out that Chantry has a boyfriend, he frees the piece of paper to the wind, and in turn actually frees this girl on the paper – she actually lifts off of the note, grows wings and begins to fly in and out of different scenes throughout the film.

Now. My favourite piece of dialogue from the film comes from Chantry. Context: her boyfriend, Ben, suggests that they could have a long-distance relationship they could tell their kids about one day. He tries to convince her by saying, “It’s romantic,” to which she replies, “Sounds lonely.” So, I think the crying, 2D fairy is there to pose the question: maybe it’s both?

See, the movie is relatively happy. I’m not going to spoil anything, but look at the genre; it’s a romantic comedy. It’s two people falling in love, and there’s no massacre at the end. But then there’s this fairy flying in and out of the picture, and she is almost always crying. Even in the scenes that I wouldn’t consider overly tragic, there’s that fairy on the wall looking like she’s just wasted all her magic on a princess who doesn’t even ride in pumpkins.

So I figured that through this juxtaposition of the fairytale and the sad fairy, Dowse is visually showing us that no story is one genre. We all know that you can’t give one label to a story, because there are elements of all sorts of genres in every tale: tragedy, romance, comedy, drama, horror – if you’re lucky, musical. But have we seen it been done this physically?

Before seeing the film, I knew that, even if they’re not flying around crying, there is always someone sad in a happy ending. But the physical fairy, who had such a visually distinct presence in an otherwise realistic-looking movie, reminded me to keep my eyes out for those misfits in the background. The genres hiding within genres and the roles hiding within roles.

So tell me, have you seen the movie? What did you think of this 2D fairy? If you haven’t seen the film, does she sound distracting or productive? Hmmm… maybe both?

RJ

Sources:

The F Word. Dir. Michael Dowse. Entertainment One, 2013. Film.