Composition Research

There are a number of rules of composition that are generally accepted in photography.  But as the old saying goes, rules are meant to be broken. That’s why in my eyes I see these “rules” more as guidelines that the majority of the time leads to a photograph that isn’t going to make people go wow, isn’t going to make people think about the message of the photograph, they’re just going to go ‘meh’.  Therefore you’ve got to challenge the existing guidelines and push the boundaries. In this section I’ll be attempting to explain these rules/guidelines giving examples of my own work and found images.  

The photographic techniques that I am looking at in this section include:

• Rule of Thirds
• Leading Lines 
• Negative Space 
• Depth of Field
• Cropping

          This picture is intended to demonstrate negative space, I took this with a SLR camera and editited it in photoshop. 

                                                

Negative Space
These's photographs show negative space as the background to the subject of the photo is either a plain colour throughout, such as white, or it is a repetitive image such as a brick wall.

original

Leading Lines- these are strong lines that direct the viewers eye to the focal point of the image.

Focal Points- The point of a photo that our eyes are naturally drawn to.

Leading lines can be found as either natural objects or ones that are man made examples of these are Wall's, Path's, Sun/Moon Light, Trees and Rivers.

These photos all show examples of leading lines, they show this by leading the viewers eyesight to the focal point of the image. This effect sometimes enhances the photo as it can make it more dramatic such as in 1st and the last photo. 

Rule of Thirds

These photos are to show how The Rule Of thirds is used. 

The Rule of Thirds is one of the main rules of photography composition and comes from the theory that the human eye naturally gravitates to the intersection point which occur when an image is split in thirds. In the Rule of Thirds the image is split into thirds using 2 vertical lines and 2 horizontal lines forming a grid that represents a Naughts and Crosses board. It can be used in both Landscape and Portrait photography, in Portrait's the eyes are lined up with the upper horizontal intersects (as shown below) and in Landscapes the horizon is lined up with the either the top or bottom horizontal line (shown below).   

      Photos courtesy of http://learnprophotography.com/rule-of-thirds