Exercise 3

“Get out of the house and take one picture, spending no more than ten minutes to do so.

Don’t look at the picture (assuming you used a digital camera). Go back home. Write a short text (half a page) about why you took that picture. Put it into envelope A. Write another short text (half a page) about what you remember the picture to look like in your viewfinder. Put it into another envelope, B. Once done, store everything and wait four weeks, not looking at either the picture or what you wrote.”

— Jörg Colberg, Letters to yourself, The Photographer’s Playbook, p. 58

Here are my texts (there was no chance me writing half a page!)

A

The first thing I noticed was the architecture of the building itself, or maybe it was its windows. Then I saw that one side of the building was lit by the warm sunlight while the other one was not, which made for some nice contrast.

B

From my point of view the corner of the building was like a sharp angle and there was an almost perfect symmetry between the two sides of the building. On the sunlit side there was a shadow thrown by a tree on the sidewalk.