Composition and Seeing Shapes

photo by Carol Luallin

Each week the photography class finds one or two important controls on the camera we already own and use.  We learn something about the basic concepts of photography like aperture and depth of field.  We also concentrate on one of the visual elements.  For week two students looked around them for shapes and tried to use the rule of thirds.  

We have seen and accepted the unique shapes of things all of our lives, but have probably not thought a lot about it.  It's one of the things you start to notice when you're trying to learn to take better pictures.  Looking at the world through a viewfinder gives you some edges to contain your vision.  It gives you some boundaries to compare things to.  It makes you look at things in a different way. 

I encourage my students to change their pictures to black and white so that we're not distracted by all the shiny colors.  Lines and shapes and textures are often easier to emphasize without the color.  Save your original color file, change it to black and white and rename it, and you have both.  

Even if you don't have image editing software like PhotoShop, you can do basic cropping and editing in Picassa, which is free.  It's made by Google and is easy to find on the web.  Look at your world with new eyes, and share your vision with someone else.  You are an artist.

 photos by Jessica  Beethe

Littleton Photography Class - Session 5

We went outside to take landscape photographs.  Before leaving, we checked our battery, memory card capacity, and any settings that might have been changed during our last photography session.

Since we were planning to take both landscape and close-up photos, we took both wide angle and telephoto or macro lenses.  A tripod would be helpful.  Also some basic filters.

 polarizing filter - reduces or eliminates glare by only allowing light that comes from a certain direction.  Polarizing filters make the sky look bluer by reducing the glare off of the many droplets of moisture in the sky.
neutral density filter - reduces the amount of light entering the lens, and is a neutral gray color.
split neutral density filter - has a gradation from a neutral gray to clear.  By turning the gray portion of the filter toward the top, you can slightly darken a too-light sky.  Put the gray portion of the filter towards the bottom, and you can tame a too-bright land mass or body of water.  Most often used for landscape photography.

We discussed the effect aperture will have on depth of field.  The larger the aperture (smaller number), the more shallow the depth of field.  Depth of field is also affected by the focal length of the lens and by the distance to the subject.

 A telephoto lens causes an apparent condensing of the visual space.  You can see far away because of the magnification, but it all looks kind of squashed together.  A wide angle lens ( with a smaller focal length) increases depth of field.

As you move farther away from the subject, depth of field increases.  As you move closer, depth of field decreases.  Taking close-ups of plants and shots of far away landscapes is a good time to see these principles in action.

We discussed composition concepts like putting the horizon along one of the rule of thirds lines.  Framing is another composition technique often used in landscape photography.  Framing is shooting through an element to create a kind of frame for the main subject.  Tree branches or architectural elements are often useful for framing.  It also gives a feeling of depth and dimension. We also tried to look for leading lines in the landscape.

Homework for this week is to shoot at least 30 shots of urban and rural landscapes, including some close-ups.

This image from Yorkshire, England is an example of framing with tree branches.  The photo at the beginning of this post is also from Yorkshire. It was taken in Valley Gardens in Harrogate.

A close-up of a blooming crabapple tree in Denver.  A combination of the aperture and a small distance from the camera to the subject created the shallow depth of field.

Rule of Thirds

An important tool for making your compositions work is called the rule of thirds.  It is also called the 9 zone grid.  If you divide the picture space into three even parts horizontally, then divide it again into three even parts vertically, you will have a grid like the one on the photo at the left.  Place the center of interest, the part of the photo you want the eye to go to first, at one of the intersections of the grid lines.  This works every time to make your compositions more interesting.  A bullseye may be great for darts, but can make your photographs boring and static.

Some cameras have a feature that places a 9 zone grid into your viewfinder as you are composing the shot.  This is a good way to practice until the rule of thirds becomes automatic and natural to you.