Candles At Notre Dame Cathedral
Candles, featuring the Virgin Mary, inside the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
This cluster of candles at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris provided a great opportunity for a close up photo.
It’s a pretty straight forward picture, but then we often want to photograph subject matter that’s not overly complicated.
How then do we make an interesting composition and evoke a sense of mood or drama?
Pattern And Repetition Produce Great Photos
These candles were part of a much larger group, neatly positioned in rows on a stand inside Notre Dame.
The first thing I did was to move in nice and close so as to concentrate attention on an even smaller groups of candles.
I positioned my camera so that the pattern formed by the candles and the spaces between them was emphasized and a sense of symmetry revealed.
Repetition and pattern are design elements that help make sense of images by bringing a sense of order and cohesion to the composition.
I was careful to concentrate my framing and the camera's focus on a set of candles that seemed to burn particularly brightly.
I emphasized this area by employing Adobe Lightroom to darken the surrounding candles and, thereby, further draw the eye in towards the centre of the frame.
Virgin Mary candles, Notre Dame Cathedral, featuring a more antique color rendering.
Color Enhances Mood And Emotion
Just for fun I've reprocessed the image and have arrived at two new versions. Each of these features more subtle color rendition.
The image immediately above is desaturated compared to the original version at the top of this post.
The candles in the image below, while also lower in saturation, feature a gentle pink color.
I wouldn't say one version is, necessarily, better than the other.
The point is that experimentation can produce interesting alternatives that, depending upon the circumstances, may give you the result you need for the task at hand.
Virgin Mary candles, Notre Dame Cathedral, featuring a subtle pink color rendering.
From my point of view the photo is a study in composition and, primarily, about cohesion and luminosity.
An alternative reading of the photo might suggest the sense of order and calm some people find within a structured religious organization.
This was not my intention. Nevertheless, it does point to the power of art to influence the masses.
Religion and advertising are masters in the area of influence. And both have used art to influence the masses.
It’s amazing how much fun photography can be. Whether you’re messing around with your camera or experimenting with images on the desktop a whole world of opportunities await you.
Art can come out of really simple projects. It’s not so much what you photograph, but how you go about making the photo that will move your audience.
Most important of all is understanding that art doesn’t have to solve problems. That’s best left to science, medicine and technology.
Arts primary purpose is to ask questions and point us towards meaning and transcendence. And I think that’s quite enough, don’t you?
