(5B) A (very) small look at Fight Club

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(5A) Perception

The image I began with is interesting to say the least. It is an image by Ben Goossens of an owl sitting on a book on a chair in a sort of nature room. I found the concept, aesthetics, and the execution of this piece very intriguing so I decided to write about this image.

The original image has the cloudy walls as a background with the owl and chair as a main centerpiece that the eye is immediately attracted to. When I cropped the image, the space was shrunk, the chair moved into the background with the wall, and the own became the solo item in the foreground.

The main, driving lines in the first image are the corners of the walls. They all seem to be pointing to the center of the piece where the owl is. They point to the most important object and are the artists way of directing our vision. When cropped, the main lines become the back of the chair, and because they are so bold, they take away from the owl.

The chair, its shadow, the window, and where the walls connect all give us visual anchors of the depth of the picture. Our mind takes all of those things and can grasp the size and relative depth of each object. When cropped, we loose all of that. Our minds have no idea how far back, how big, or even what the background is. The clouds could be the actual outdoors from the looks of the second picture.

The first shot is a medium shot while the cropped image is much more of a close up of the beautiful, elegant bird.

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