Multiple triangles
Multiple triangles add recognizable points that everyone can appreciate
Triangles get even better when you can find more than one in the same frame, because then they reinforce each other. This is the East Gate of the old city of Dali in Yunnan, southwestern China. The morning air was clean and clear, so everything was crisp. This was toward the end of my morning walk around the historic small town, so the sun was already higher than I would have liked. There weren’t too many opportunities remaining for playing with small sunlit areas against shadows. In addition, the sky was postcardperfect blue, so I’d been avoiding having it in the frame and was concentrating on closer street-level shots. What caught my eye here was less the tower itself and more the woman working at spreading out grain on a tarpaulin. She added life and scale to an otherwise attractive but not really powerful architectural scene, and this meant that the sky was unavoidable.
Shooting for black and white seemed an obvious choice. First, it would get me away from the chocolate-box colours in the upper part of the frame. Second, I could go for a stark treatment and bring out the graphics. Deciding between colour and black and white is another creative choice, but in this case it’s connected to the theme of triangles. The reason: any shapes in a frame that rely on the play of light and shadow become clearer without the distraction of colour – the case here. The woman was the trigger for the shot; she was still a small actor in a bigger scene.
The gable was the most obvious triangle, but from this angle and with this framing there were two other triangles, and both of them depended on hard-edged shadows. The larger had all three apexes just outside the frame, but is no less a triangle for that. The smaller one shares the same lower edge, which falls across the ground, but then follows the stone balustrade of the staircase and its shadow near the top, up toward the tower. All of this isn’t quite enough to make a strong image. However the woman, picking up grain from a pile to spread out to dry on a tarpaulin adds something. Her figure looks best when just in the sunlight, standing out clearly against dark shadow, but see how her stance makes a big difference. In the two other shots shown here she’s just a figure, but in the main image she leans forward, making a small triangle herself. Better still, her figure matches the just-lit front of the balustrade, and they work together with the point of the tower’s roof to make a three-point implied triangle. In total, the suggestion of all these triangles help each other. When you see one you see them all, and while they’re not shouting out ‘look triangles!’ the overall effect is of a stark and structured composition.