What are the characteristics of photography and film in the Philippines

We have once said that a good way to learn photography is by reading books. But not books dedicated to the photographic technique, but investing part of our time in deepening the photographic art itself.

This kind of reading is very enriching because it helps you understand photography and take it to another level. At a more “artistic” level, far from the typical exercises where we must place the subject in one of the strong points of the rule of thirds.

Characteristics of Good Photography

1. Intelligent Composition

This is perhaps the most technical part of what a “good photograph” would be. Normally we tend to consider a good image to be one that is correctly focused, well exposed, composed according to the rules. A clean photograph. But we have often said that a “perfect” photograph does not have to be good.

So the important thing for making a good photograph is to know what we are doing. And, above all, to be aware that yes, a blurry photograph can be good. Yes, a grainy photograph can be good. Yes, a photograph with an unbalanced composition can be good. As long as there is an intention in it. As long as the artist knows why he’s doing it. And, in order to break the rules in this way, one must first know them.

2. It provokes a reaction

In other words, it draws attention. On more than one occasion I have come across images (my own and those of others) that have kept me hooked on the paper or the screen for long periods of time while looking at them. There are images that have “something” that attracts your eyes.

Good images are attractive in a natural way and for many reasons: for their composition, for their protagonists, for the story they tell, for the eye of the artist who took them. Many of these things cannot be provoked, so focus on expressing things with your images. That’s the best way to get good pictures.

3. It offers more than one layer of experience

Contemplating a “good photograph” is always a complete experience. A good image is not just observed, a high quality photograph must be read, it must have different expressive planes. A good photograph is expressive in its entirety.

How do you generate different layers of experience with a photograph? The easiest way is to use composition and depth of field to tell different things. Don’t focus on the foreground, contextualize our stories, hide details throughout the composition of our images.

In short: don’t make our images too obvious. When we see a photograph, the first glance already gives us a lot of information. A good photograph does not stop at that first glance: it hides little pills of information all along the picture whose function is, besides completing all the sense of the work, to challenge the eye of the one who sees the image to look for them.

4. It has its context in the photograph

Good photographs have a cultural context: they define a “now” and a “here”. They serve to tell stories, or to show events, characters, objects. This context is also conditioned by the references that both the artist and the public of the image may have. And all this is involved in order to give meaning to a good photograph.

5. It contains an idea

This does not mean that good photographs need to convey a profound message that invites everyone who sees them to reflect on some important subject in life.

An idea can take many forms: it can be a concept, yes, but it can also be a concrete way of looking at reality. Or a concrete way of showing it through photographic composition or by choosing the determined exhibition values to do it in the way that the artist is most interested in. The important thing is that photography transmits something.

6. They do not imitate

And by not imitating, you don’t want to convey the concept of originality. It refer to the fact of “not copying” other artists. Photography as an art has limitations, it is true, but it also has very specific characteristics that make it unique (just as other types of art have their own).

A good photograph “explores and exploits its own medium, and this means having a clear idea of what photography excels at.

These are all characteristics of photography as an artistic medium. A good photographer is aware of all this and a good photograph makes it evident to everyone who sees it. So: a good photograph is, first of all, a photograph. It should not try to imitate other artistic media. Although it may seem silly, it is so.

What is a good photograph? It is a conscious, meaningful image.

Is it easy to get a good photograph? If we simply follow the six points that define what a good photograph is, it may seem easy to achieve. But the secret of these six points is to do it with grace and strength.

When you shoot you end up merging with the camera, this ends up being one more extension of your body and when you achieve this and you also have clear what you want to achieve when you press the shutter, the magic happens and good photographs appear.

Home Entertainment & Pop Culture Movies

A film, also called a movie or a motion picture, is a series of still photographs on film projected onto a screen using light in rapid succession. The optical phenomenon known as persistence of vision gives the illusion of actual, smooth, and continuous movement.

Films can be classified as documentaries, experimental films, animated films, and fictional genres such as westerns, comedies, thrillers, and musicals, among many others.

Some of the major awards given for films are the Academy Awards, the British Academy of Film and Television Awards, and the Césars.

film, also called motion picture or movie, series of still photographs on film, projected in rapid succession onto a screen by means of light. Because of the optical phenomenon known as persistence of vision, this gives the illusion of actual, smooth, and continuous movement.

Film is a remarkably effective medium in conveying drama and especially in the evocation of emotion. The art of motion pictures is exceedingly complex, requiring contributions from nearly all the other arts as well as countless technical skills (for example, in sound recording, photography, and optics). Emerging at the end of the 19th century, this new art form became one of the most popular and influential media of the 20th century and beyond.

Who directed Avatar? Which hit movie from 1986 was about the U.S. Navy’s best aviators? Test your knowledge of cinema in this quiz.

As a commercial venture, offering fictional narratives to large audiences in theatres, film was quickly recognized as perhaps the first truly mass form of entertainment. Without losing its broad appeal, the medium also developed as a means of artistic expression in such areas as acting, directing, screenwriting, cinematography, costume and set design, and music.

In its short history, the art of motion pictures has frequently undergone changes that seemed fundamental, such as those resulting from the introduction of sound. It exists today in styles that differ significantly from country to country and in forms as diverse as the documentary created by one person with a handheld camera and the multimillion-dollar epic involving hundreds of performers and technicians.

A number of factors immediately come to mind in connection with the film experience. For one thing, there is something mildly hypnotic about the illusion of movement that holds the attention and may even lower critical resistance. The accuracy of the film image is compelling because it is made by a nonhuman, scientific process. In addition, the motion picture gives what has been called a strong sense of being present; the film image always appears to be in the present tense. There is also the concrete nature of film; it appears to show actual people and things.

No less important than any of the above are the conditions under which the motion picture ideally is seen, where everything helps to dominate the spectators. They are taken from their everyday environment, partially isolated from others, and comfortably seated in a dark auditorium. The darkness concentrates their attention and prevents comparison of the image on the screen with surrounding objects or people. For a while, spectators live in the world the motion picture unfolds before them.

Still, the escape into the world of the film is not complete. Only rarely does the audience react as if the events on the screen are real—for instance, by ducking before an onrushing locomotive in a special three-dimensional effect. Moreover, such effects are considered to be a relatively low form of the art of motion pictures. Much more often, viewers expect a film to be truer to certain unwritten conventions than to the real world. Although spectators may sometimes expect exact realism in details of dress or locale, just as often they expect the film to escape from the real world and make them exercise their imagination, a demand made by great works of art in all forms.

The sense of reality most films strive for results from a set of codes, or rules, that are implicitly accepted by viewers and confirmed through habitual filmgoing. The use of brownish lighting, filters, and props, for example, has come to signify the past in films about American life in the early 20th century (as in The Godfather [1972] and Days of Heaven [1978]). The brownish tinge that is associated with such films is a visual code intended to evoke a viewer’s perceptions of an earlier era, when photographs were printed in sepia, or brown, tones. Storytelling codes are even more conspicuous in their manipulation of actual reality to achieve an effect of reality. Audiences are prepared to skip over huge expanses of time in order to reach the dramatic moments of a story. La battaglia di Algeri (1966; The Battle of Algiers), for example, begins in a torture chamber where a captured Algerian rebel has just given away the location of his cohorts. In a matter of seconds that location is attacked, and the drive of the search-and-destroy mission pushes the audience to believe in the fantastic speed and precision of the operation. Furthermore, the audience readily accepts shots from impossible points of view if other aspects of the film signal the shot as real. For example, the rebels in The Battle of Algiers are shown inside a walled-up hiding place, yet this unrealistic view seems authentic because the film’s grainy photography plays on the spectator’s unconscious association of poor black-and-white images with newsreels.

The Godfather

Salvatore Corsitto (left) and Marlon Brando in The Godfather (1972), directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Fidelity in the reproduction of details is much less important than the appeal made by the story to an emotional response, an appeal based on innate characteristics of the motion-picture medium. These essential characteristics can be divided into those that pertain primarily to the motion-picture image, those that pertain to motion pictures as a unique medium for works of art, and those that derive from the experience of viewing motion pictures.

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