Three years ago I graduated from Emily Carr University having studied industrial design. Although I never found a job in that field, the lessons I learned there play a key role in my success as a photographer today. Here are the top three things I learned in art school.
Took this back when I was in Emily Carr. This is a picture of the fourth year design studio. A creative mess to say the least
Composition
It’s no secret that composition is highly important in photography, second only to maybe light. Good composition tells a story, can make a bad background good and can make a boring subject interesting. The thing is, I learned about composition through the study of 3d objects whereas my art today works in two dimensions. Every piece of art, whether it be a picture, painting, sculpture, or product has a dominant, subdominant, and subordinate element to it. Each one of these elements is distinctive and it should be obvious what each one of these elements is. For example, lets take a standard headshot. The dominant element is the eyes. The subdominant is the rest of the subject. The subordinate is the background; yes even if the background is all white. Negative space gives a place for the eyes to rest. Hone this knowledge and your composition will be killer.
Feedback
Feedback is basically direct advice. In art school, we would constantly get and give feedback to our peers. Feedback from those who are striving towards the same goals, and from those who are where you want to be, helps so much in quickly improving your craft. Receiving constant feedback also taught us to separate ourselves from our work. Just because you take one bad picture, it doesn’t mean all the rest of your photos are bad either; but there is something to be learned from that image so that you can improve next time. Whenever I second shoot for another photographer, I always ask for feedback about my work so that I’m constantly improving.
Perfecting your craft
Perfecting your craft is essential in being an artist and this is something that I’m confident that I will be working at until the day I retire. As a student in the industrial design program, I made countless mock-ups and prototypes of my projects just to get my ideas out there and to test them. In terms of sketching I’d spend hours practicing very basic things just so when it came time to actually drawing something, I knew that my technical skills would be sound. I remember just sitting there and practicing drawing straight lines without a ruler, page after page, just so I could draw a perfect square.
The same approach is taken towards my photo work. Sure you can say that shooting weddings from one to another is practice based on the principle that you should improve from one to the other, but I feel that thats almost a given. When I’m not working with couples, I’m shooting other things that can help me get better at photographing weddings. These photos may never see the light of day, but the proof of progression is in the practice. This is just the tip of the iceberg as I’m obsessed with constantly improving my work.
There are other things that I can write about, but I could consider those three things to be the meat and potatoes. Some photographers I’ve spoken to say going through art school, in general, is probably better than going through school for photography. While I can’t really speak to that since I never studied photo in school I can definitely say that the lessons learned during my time at Emily Carr and invaluable and will be applied to my career as a wedding photographer for many years to come.