Mood Board and Introduction
For this project I explored Alfred Stieglitz’s work on patterns in the sky.
Mind-map of ideas
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred was an American Photographer born in 1864. He was an integral part in an acceptance of photography as an art form. He created a portfolio of pieces which focused on the pattern of things. His favorite way to capture this was by looking up and shooting patterns in the sky.
His images possessed flat, faded, contrast with bright, harsh highlights. They are also populated with pattern with little negative space.
In this image Alfred captures an astral, melancholic but also euphoric, free emotion with this image. It seems as if an artist has painted on these clouds. The flat contrast and sandpaper clouds give this image a faded, rough texture.
He has used natural light streaming in from the corners of the image to give it an astral glow. He has still managed to, even though there seems to be harsh daylight, combat this by slightly under exposing the image by deepening the blacks of the sky by using the cameras film. he has used a small aperture to gain detail in the distant cloud formations and give the image depth. Alfred might have used a slightly longer exposure to drag the clouds across the composition. He has also used a higher ISO to add a fine grain to the image.
The image also contains a pattern of the repeating clouds sweeping upwards. There is also a significant depth in tone created by the blackened sky contrasting with the white clouds. The image is also populated with little negative space.
Photo Shoot Action Plan
Who: There will be no subject in this project.
What: Cloud patterns.
Where: I will be shooting near my house and close to the coast as there tends to be more interesting cloud formations there.
When: On an overcast day
How: DSLR 50mm – 80mm lens with small aperture capability, lense hood to prevent glare and a ND filter to grab blacker skies. Walk down to coast and around my neighborhood looking up and following cloud patterns
Why: To experiment and learn more about photographing pattern.
Contact Sheets
Final Compositions
My above compositions portray the experimentation of pattern. They use deep tonal range with deep depth of field. My compositions featured similar elements to Alfreds work.
My image 
Alfred’s image
Both pieces include soft sweeping pattern work. They both use de saturated deep black negative spaces with the cotton clouds contrasting in the foreground. They both Make use of natural lighting adding accents to the patterns from a certain direction. They both use a small aperture to gain detail and depth in the clouds. They both consider a longer exposure time to drag the clouds out more. Both images hold a gloomy astral emotion. Finally, one difference is Alfred uses a flat contrast and my image contains a deeper contrast.