Following on from a post I did earlier about framing, after being inspired by Pat Kay’s series on Visual Patterns, the next one to look at is ‘negative space’.
Here’s his video:
He describes negative space as ’empty as opposed to filled’ space.
Quite coincidentally I found myself creating some images with negative space by accident. Last night my favourite football team, Leeds United, were playing at 8pm so thought I’d go for a country walk, listen to the commentary and, of course, take my camera. It was pitch black, quite starry but no moon. I took along my video light as I’d be meaning to experiment creating landscape shots at night using this quite powerful light.
It quickly dawned on me after composing and taking two or three shots that of course there was going to be negative space – apart from the subject that was being lit everything else was going to be black.
So here are some from the walk – my first conscious attempts at working with this visual pattern.
Of course negative space doesn’t need to be black darkness and I’ll experiment more with it during daylight hours but this was useful. The light created a subject and everything else faded to nothing. In terms of composing I guess this is what you are aiming to do with images that use negative space.