Thank you for all who make it out to composition meeting this past week. If you missed the meeting or want to review what we talked about, here is the recap.
Purdue Engineering Fountain. Photo by Nathaniel Young.
First off, your composition is basically the subject of which you are taking a photo of. When you are taking a photo, you should think about what you want the viewer to look at and what you do not want the viewer to look at. In the photo above, the main subject is the Purdue Engineering Fountain. Since there is only one subject in the frame, it makes sense to frame that in the center of the photo. The pathway and trees all help lead the viewer’s eye towards the subject. In addition, we can see that we have multiple layers in the photo. We have the pathway and trees starting in the foreground and leading towards the middleground of the Engineering Fountain with the sky in the far background. Having multiple layers in a photo can help create depth and interest in your photo. In order to create depth in a photo, you do not always have to have a super shallow depth of field. In this case, the photo was taken with a medium wide focal length (35mm), but we have pretty much everything in focus. Depth in this photo was created by using the leading lines and different layers from the foreground to the background.
Purdue Women’s Basketball. Photo by Nathaniel Young.
In this photo I took at the women’s basketball game, the athlete is the subject of the photo, but she is off center. In this case, having the subject off center works well because she is looking in the direction of the side of the photo with more empty space. And while there are no leading lines in this photo, depth was created by having a shallower depth of field which allows the subject to be separated from the background better. Also, this photo was taken at 36 MP but the final photo was cropped to about 22 MP. The reason why I mention this is because you should definitely not be shy to crop a photo; by cropping this photo, I was able to improve my composition.
In the first photo, we again have a wider focal length with the leading lines of the trail which help bring the viewer’s eyes into the photo. Again, we have the hiker here slightly off center facing towards the direction of the photo with more empty space. In this photo, we also have some nice color contrast. If you look at a color wheel, colors on opposite sides can create nice color contrast. So in this situation, we have the redish-orange tones of the wet trail in contrast to the aqua-green tones of the misty trees. In the second photo, we do not have leading lines, but we do have a subject centered in the frame with the background nicely out of focus. One thing to note is that people are drawn towards brighter and more saturated colors in a photo, so it makes sense that in this photo that the brighter colors are on our subject. In addition, I have darkened the edges of the frame with a vignette to draw the viewers eyes towards the subject.
Overall, think about these things when you are composing your photo.
Leading lines
Depth (foreground/middleground/background)
Focal length
Shallow versus large depth of field
Rule of thirds (or golden ratio) versus center framed
Contrasting colors
Textures/details
Finally, here are some more tips you can do in post-processing to improve your photo.
Crop your photo
In Photoshop, use the crop tool (keyboard shortcut “C”) to open the crop tool.
Once you click and see the guides with the box to crop your photo, you can use the keyboard shortcut “O” to cycle through the different guidelines on the crop tool including the thirds, golden ratio, and the fibonacci spiral.
Vignette
Darken the edges of the frame to bring focus to your subject.
Spot removal – good to remove distractions in your frame
This can be achieved with the healing brush tool, clone stamp tool, content aware fill, patch tool, etc. in Photoshop.
Also, if you want to see a color wheel, take a look at Adobe color. Take a look at complementary and triad color harmonies which work well for most photographs. Ever wonder why the teal and orange look is so popular? It is because human skin tones fall in the orange tones, so it is natural to use teal color tones to create color contrast and separation.
After the meeting, we headed out to practice and take some photos around campus. Here are some photos from that evening taken by Nick Johanson.
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