View allAll Photos Tagged Composition
Composition of many long exposures of the moon setting behind bands of clouds, including a few frames where fireworks were going off.
ShelterBox is an international disaster relief charity that delivers emergency shelter, warmth and dignity to people affected by disaster worldwide.
Gouache on paper
9.5 x 8.5 inches, 2010
This piece + other studies will be on display in Miami, with What It Is @ Verge, Dec 2nd thru Dec 5th. Catalina Hotel, rm 112. wot-it-is.com
Rules of composition:
Subject is taken with camera in high looking down.
Why is this a good picture:
The subject is taken from a high angle and the subject is well focused.
How can this be improved:
Taken from a different angle.
I should probably give some context to this image and the Golden Spiral hairline that is superimposed on it.
Composition is a constant refrain in my photographic work. I've taken classes in it, read alot about it and indeed teach composition for photographers as well.
I've been mentally visualizing formal compositional geometries on the viewfinder for several years and it has become a habit whenever I pick up a camera. Nevertheless, it's often a surprise when I look at an image in the processing phase to see just how strongly those forms are embedded.
This shot is a good example of that mental process. When I took this shot I was concerned with getting the area of highest contrast in the picture, the bowsprit, somewhere near one of the golden section line intersections. I was also concerned that the angle of the steel work on the bowsprit point up towards the upper right corner of the frame. I took about 3 shots of this scene, varying the exposure a bit each time but altering the view point only a tiny bit in each. In the end, I wound up selecting this particular image as the best of the batch.
As the hairline on the image shows, the bowsprit fitting is located nearly perfectly on the origin of the golden spiral. Similarly, the curve of the hull of the boat follows the outward track of the spiral as well. As t turns out the diagonals of the bowsprit fitting point directly to the corner fairly precisely. The combination of the golden spiral and diagonal elements working with the forms of the boat in the image give the image, at least to me, a sense of proportion and of completeness.
For those that are interested in the processing, the above image is a screen shot from Lightroom 3, with a slight neutral gradient applied to the sky, as well as corrections for lens distortion, a little noise reduction and a little sharpening. In my normal workflow, this image, with this amount of processing, would then be exported into Photoshop 5 for additional color work (using Nik Viveza), converted to black (using Nik Silver Efx 2) and then toned, with a final pass of sharpening and watermarked. You can see the result of that workflow in the final image.
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