1805_3184 Altocumulus Morning Sky
More birds coming; it has been a good spring season for birds. But for now, and while I catch up on processing, a morning sky with an amazing combination of altocumulus clouds and crepuscular rays.
Rule of thirds? Forget it! It works a lot of the time, because it's about universally accepted principles of visual design and spatial organization. But if I'd been thinking "thirds", I would have missed this composition. With a reasonably blank mind - easier to achieve the older I get - I was able to respond to my subject, rather than try to impose or overlay something on the subject. This is an important distinction.
If I had been following a formula, placing the horizon line one third of the way up from the bottom, I would have chopped important cloud detail from the top. Because of the extreme contrast that results from shooting directly into the sun (even a sun mostly masked by the clouds), I knew the land mass in the foreground would be nearly solid black. Did I want to fill up one third of my image with solid black? I see this fairly often in landscape images; it rarely works out. The glory lay in the light, not the featureless foreground, so I knew in an instant that I would fill most of the frame with sky. You can't go wrong when the light itself is your subject!
Photographed in Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan (Canada). Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission © 2018 James R. Page - all rights reserved.
1805_3184 Altocumulus Morning Sky
More birds coming; it has been a good spring season for birds. But for now, and while I catch up on processing, a morning sky with an amazing combination of altocumulus clouds and crepuscular rays.
Rule of thirds? Forget it! It works a lot of the time, because it's about universally accepted principles of visual design and spatial organization. But if I'd been thinking "thirds", I would have missed this composition. With a reasonably blank mind - easier to achieve the older I get - I was able to respond to my subject, rather than try to impose or overlay something on the subject. This is an important distinction.
If I had been following a formula, placing the horizon line one third of the way up from the bottom, I would have chopped important cloud detail from the top. Because of the extreme contrast that results from shooting directly into the sun (even a sun mostly masked by the clouds), I knew the land mass in the foreground would be nearly solid black. Did I want to fill up one third of my image with solid black? I see this fairly often in landscape images; it rarely works out. The glory lay in the light, not the featureless foreground, so I knew in an instant that I would fill most of the frame with sky. You can't go wrong when the light itself is your subject!
Photographed in Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan (Canada). Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission © 2018 James R. Page - all rights reserved.