 You might have already guessed this, but photography for a lot of photographers is actually just kind of like playing around. And actually this right here is an example of a photographer playing around. I was on a trip recently across the country, I was going to visit some friends and I was in the train station with my little tiny camera, my little like $5 digital camera, and I saw these lines on the floor. This is the ceiling being, there's a glass ceiling above me and it's reflecting down onto this really cool slate patterned floor, you know, this sort of stone floor. And I just thought, wow, that's really cool. It was early morning and then there were people rushing by. This was like a main thoroughfare. It was like right here at the top there were people walking by and there was a cafe nearby and I saw a bunch of them walking out with coffees in their hands. So I waited and I just kind of put myself in a spot and here I've got like 20 minutes for my trains to come before my train was coming. So I just kind of thought, okay, I'm just going to wait until I get one of these people here and that's what I did. So I just was here, all I'm doing is playing with pattern and playing with shape and playing with texture. So that is the subject of today's lesson. We're going to do textures, we're going to do patterns. And what was the other one? Textures, patterns and oh yeah, shapes. There we go. Alright, so how about we move on to the next image and we'll talk about what I was doing here, which actually this is kind of a cool image because back here on this desk that you're seeing in the background, this is where all of our city happens. I make all of my videos here at my computer at my desk. And right here behind me you can see that I have got my clothes hanger. And the reason I put this in, this is not a revolutionary image, this is not amazing. But you can see I've combined kind of two things that I really like to think about in photography. I see I've got this light coming in, so I've got a back light coming in and shining on all of these clothes hangers here. Then I've just got all my shirts and stuff hanging up on there and I kind of just like the way that this thing sort of repeats itself. And that's one of the great things about photography. You can look for repetition and make it sort of a part of your image. You can see here I was just kind of playing with shape, I was playing with repetition, I was playing with pattern. You can see that the pattern sort of all there's some spots where the pattern kind of comes together and then there's some spots where it falls apart. And you can see here there's lots of kind of cool shapes that are all sort of leading down to my table here, to my desk, into my window. And that's something that you can do when you're working on your photography. You can think about what the way that lines lead through your photograph, what things they meet along the way and you can kind of try to line them up. Here we've got another example of repetition and shape and pattern. And here you can see we're walking along a canal and for the life of me I wish that I would have put her head right here. This is my host mother. I lived in Germany for a while when I was younger and she put me up for a long time and was a very good friend of mine. And here we were just walking along the canal and she was talking and thinking about a few things. And like I said, I wish I would have put her head in a different spot, but I kind of liked this sort of these lines that were happening here and these circles and the repetition right here that you can see. I wanted to make sure that that was a part of the image. So I didn't quite execute it perfectly, but it does give you kind of an example of ways that you can use repetition to make a more effective image. I think it kind of is a nice portrait of Geraldo. Like I said, I didn't do it exactly perfectly. Here you can see two examples of me just playing around with my camera and messing a little bit with repetition. You can even see reflection right here. At this one right here I was standing on a grate and I had sort of a bad lens and I didn't exactly line this up perfectly. So you can see here that I kind of made a common mistake that you see in photography where it's a little bit out of alignment. And it's just because I didn't line up my camera perfectly with what I was shooting. So that's one thing you want to watch for. You can see how the lines are sort of not falling perfectly into place. But it's kind of cool and it was just sort of a fun photo that I took with. I think I took this actually with my cell phone. So you can kind of take cool interesting photos like that. And I take a lot of photos of my feet for some reason. I just took one a couple minutes ago when I was walking down the street. Here to the left you can see I was at dinner one night and I was at a restaurant and there was a window that was open and there was this old wall sort of behind it with paint and stucco and sort of cool stuff. And then there was like this piece of like maybe dirt coming down the window or something like that. It might have been bird poop. I'm not exactly sure. But you can see that there's a woman sitting here outside of the restaurant. And I just really liked the light. I really liked the way that was coming in and I like the way that this pattern that's in the background, this sort of stucco-y pattern, sort of melds into this image and then sort of fades out as light gets stronger. So you can see here the light in the foreground is not very strong. But as you get closer to the background it sort of fades in. And I just really liked the way it was doing that. So I took a photograph of it. And you can see here there's a very cool mixture of the pattern of the wall that's being reflected in the window and the wall that's behind the window, which I think is kind of cool. And you can play around with that sort of thing. So pattern doesn't necessarily need to be something that you directly see. It can be something that you're seeing through another thing, like a window. Here is another photograph of a window. And this is just an example of how you can use pattern and sort of repetition. You can see that this is basically creating a visual texture, although it's not really a texture per se because if you were to put your hands on it the water would wash away or if you were to be able to reach outside of this train that I was riding in. But it's just a way of using the elements of this photograph to tell a story. And the story for this element was that I was riding in a train in southern England and it was raining and I wanted to say that and that was it. I didn't really care about getting my friend in focus or anything like that. I just wanted to have this rain water here on the window. Here you can see repetition happening again. This is because there was really little option in this case. I wanted to take a photograph of this light that was coming in from the side here. This morning light shining in to this forest. And I really wanted to catch that and I wanted to catch just the repetition of these trees. So that's a form of shape. I wanted a very vertical sort of repetitious surface here and I wanted to kind of create a visual surface like that. It's not the most amazing picture. Again, I wish that there was maybe some fog in here or something like that or maybe if I would have been there a little earlier in the morning it would have been a little more mysterious with a little bit less light. But it kind of just shows you one way that you can look at it because you could take this photo in many different ways and this is maybe one of the better ways that you can capture this. Now we can move on a little bit to using shape and direction and pattern in sort of different ways like in using them to sort of create a directionality for a photograph. So you can see here the far left image. This is my little sister Sadie hugging her horse, Jake. And you can see here the grass in the background is kind of all going in this direction. To the left here. It's because the wind on this field always blows across to that way in that direction. And then you can see the hair of her horse, Jake, is all sort of coming over like this and you can see her hair is kind of going off in directions like that as well. And I just sort of liked the feeling of that directionality. I kind of, I didn't maybe zoom in on it as close as I would now looking at it with some distance, but it's one way that you can kind of think about it. You want to look for patterns even if they're very subtle and natural patterns like this. How different would it look if her hair was going the other direction into his hair? It might not look quite as cool, but here you can see their hair both kind of going off to the one side. Here you can see an example of me doing the same thing I was doing before minus my feet and it's just me taking a self portrait. This is me hovering over this sort of funny grate here and I was in what's called the Potsdamer Center here, the Sony Center in Berlin. And there was some cool blue light above me and some turning purple here you can see. And I just wanted to get my shadow on this very cool surface. So it was just me messing around with texture. I mean, again, this is just an iPhone photo, I think, nothing important. But this kind of gets at how you can use shape and pattern and texture to your advantage as a photographer. Here you can see one of the cool, very cool rules of photography at play. You've got one, two, three subjects. It always helps to have three people in your images because two can kind of often feel a little bit static. But here we've got these three kids and what I like about this image is just this sort of directionality of the grating that they're leaning up against and they're looking down into a courtyard here. And you kind of have this nice kind of closed off image. You're kind of using the composition to sort of make a box and have them look into it a little bit. Again, not the most amazing photograph, but it kind of captures a nice evening. We're all sitting out on the deck upstairs and at a friend's house and the kids were playing in the yard and it just kind of looks nice. And again, you can kind of be on the lookout for shapes and patterns when you're doing images like this even. It doesn't have to be just really artistic, fancy stuff. Here you can see my roommate Joseph and we are out just hanging out in Berlin and this is at a memorial that has a big tank and we were messing around on this big sort of, well it's not a tank, it's just a really big gun. And you can see him hanging off of it here. And this is just kind of using shape again. I kind of wanted to make a connection between the ground and the barrel of this gun and kind of give it some size, give it some perspective. You can see how big it is. He's sticking his whole hand inside of that. And I kind of also like one of the things about this that I like is this sort of triangle that you can kind of see being created right here. There's sort of a triangle in the middle and then you've got another triangle over here kind of in your composition. Triangles can sometimes look very good. You actually see that there's even a triangle right up here and so they all kind of have this sort of feeling of kind of closure in a way or sort of a compactness to the image that is kind of cool. And you can also see that you have this element coming out this way and he is looking that way. Another question that you might ask yourself when you're looking at images like that is how would it look different if you was looking that way? Do you think it would have the same impact or do you think it would be as interesting? So that's just another image that kind of shows you an example of shape more in this case. All right, so that was your lesson about shape and pattern and all those sort of good things. You can come check out more videos and learn more about photography and other things at adversity.org.