After posting this article in response to the previous post about composition, I was asked if I had any other links.
As a disclaimer, I don’t necessarily endorse these but over the years I’ve taken from them the parts that resonated.
Feel free to do the same and I hope you get as much from them as I have.
A post by Andrew S. Gibson which talks about gesture and punctuation.
Ken Rockwell gets a lot of stick but he’s a great resource if you don’t take him too seriously. His page on composition.
I feel I’m missing some, I’ll add them if I can find them.
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The article talks about a lot of interesting composition concepts, but to me it comes across as “euphorically enlightened” and preachy. In particular the parts about cropping.
That’s understandable. I said that I hope you can use the concepts that you connect with, and I tried to imply that to do so you may have to read around the authors.
What I’m trying to say is that these authors are professional photographers and also teachers. We aren’t in their classroom, we can’t request a different approach when it’s not clicking. But they aren’t wrong.
Get past their style and focus on the concepts and, at each one that interests you, use different authors to change the approach.
I also agree that cropping isn’t a bad thing per se, but I do think that it doesn’t really help with composition. It’s another retouch tool to tidy up, like dodge and burn etc.
Additionally, attempting to make your image as final as you can in the viewfinder, can only go to improve your compositions. Practice…etc.
We’re on the same page! Again it was a really interesting article with lots of valuable info, I definitely learned a thing or two and I’ve been composing frames for a long time. I’m going to read the other ones you posted soon. As for cropping, it’s an inevitable reality when it comes to some jobs with high volumes. The author does fine art where I actually agree that getting your composition perfect in camera is the best, but it was unnecessarily partisan, like an Xbox vs Playstation vibe.
Ha, yeah that’s fair. I’m probably overly pragmatic, engineer mindset!
This is a great read, particularly the points about balance.
My phone’s camera only has the thirds grid, unfortunately, although I had an older app that used to have a few options (but not dynamic symmetry grid).
Switch off the grid :)
