Photo Composition

So this week's assignments took us on a road to compositional enlightenment. One of our first stops was the Rule of Thirds. I'd heard of this concept before, but only had a vague idea of what it meant. Following this rule, a photographer takes their compositional "canvas" and splits it vertically and horizontally into thirds, creating an imaginary tic-tac-toe board over the image. By lining the main subject up on one of these intersections, the piece gains greater compositional value and becomes more interesting. In the images below, I've expanded this concept not only to the alignment of the objects in the frame, but also to their physical positioning to further highlight the importance of proper subject placement.

Moving further into the lesson, we were asked to define "aesthetics". Being the literal mind that I am, I immediately reached out to my online friend, Dictionary.com, who returned this rather cold and clinical definintion: aesthetics is "the branch of philosophy dealing with such notions as the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the comic, etc., as applicable to the fine arts, with a view to establishing the meaning and validity of critical judgments concerning works of art, and the principles underlying or justifying such judgments." Mind thoroughly numbed, I began to drift off and attempt to brainstorm when I noticed the second, more concise definition on the list: aesthetics is "the study of the mind and emotions in relation to the sense of beauty." Now that's something that I can sink my teeth into!

Every image, regardless of the content, must appeal to an individual on some level. This is the point of this artform. Aesthetics is the study of how to make these images appealing, from the rule of thirds to the color wheel and color schemes to the selection of the subject matter itself. Each person will have their own definition of what aesthetics are and how each image should be composed, but there are certain constants, such as the rule of thirds and the concepts of complimentary colors.

The final assignment this week was to capture a few pictures using the "framing" technique, essentially framing your subject behind and through some foreground scenery, and create a digital slideshow (shown below) of these images. This was a fun bit of the assignment, as I really like the multimedia stuff.

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While I was doing these assingments, I was reminded of an old project that I'd put together. I wanted to share it here with everyone. This is an image that I composited in Photoshop a while back that I thought really emphasized the whole "framing" concept. I had taken a picture of my car's rearview mirror, and had nice photo of some foliage that just didn't seem to do anything on it's own. I took the two and created this totally new image, unknowingly using the framing technique to add a whole new dimension to both images.