My Travel to Musandam Oman Part 1

My Daily Photo 6

During Eid Mubarak (a holiday after Ramadan) we go out of town. And this my travel photo from the northern part of United Arab Emirates...

Composition is Essential in Photography

Photography Composition' is something of a dirty word in some photographic circles, because of the way that certain rules used to be raised to the status of a religion, and a picture which did not follow the Rules of Photography Composition was automatically disregarded by the self-appointed pundits in the camera clubs and photo magazines. Even so, the old 'rules' (the Rule of Third) are excellent general guidelines, though you should never be afraid to break them if you can get a better picture that way.

Composition is all about how you arrange the elements of the scene in front of you. While you can't move the landscape, you will still have plenty of opportunities for perfecting your composition.

For a subject to be strong enough to be worth photographing, the relationship of its forms must be rigorously established. Photography composition starts when you situate your camera in space in relation to the object. For me, photography is the exploration in reality of the rhythm of surfaces, lines, or values; the eye carves out its subject, and the camera has only to do its work. That work is simply to print the eye’s decision on film. -Henri Cartier-Bresson



The best advice I can give is to use your feet. Get out there and walk around your chosen area to see how the elements within the landscape work together. Change your viewpoint - don't stick to the 'standard' eyeball-height view (everyone does this), so get down on the ground or get up to a height and use uncommon viewpoints to see if these perspectives can improve a scene. Take a look at the tips on landscape photography for more ideas. Photography composition is more art than science, although using scientific principles will get you better results, but you need to go beyond that. A book like Photography: The Art Of Composition will help increase your artistic proficiency while still keeping you grounded in the science.

Always take your time while composing a photograph. While changing light conditions can mean you need to work fast, I find that using a tripod slows things down and means that I have to think about what I'm photographing and the composition I'm trying to achieve rather than quickly snapping a scene in the hopes it'll turn out well when I look at it at home. Since I use a tripod, I'm more likely to go to a greater effort in getting a good photo to reward the time I've put into setting up the shot. If your exposures are going to be long, a tripod will ensure your photos are as sharp as possible.

Photography: Landscape

A landscape is a section or portion of scenery as seen from a single viewpoint. Scenery is the subject of a landscape image. Typically, people and animals are not shown in a landscape, unless they are relatively small in the image and have been included in the composition to show scale. Some photographers argue that the sea coast, the city and man-made structures in general should not be included in a landscape, and images that do contain them are more accurately called seascapes or cityscapes. From a purist perspective, they are probably correct, since a landscape is a picture of the land and its aggregate natural features. However, if natural scenery dominates an image, it can probably be accurately termed a landscape, even though there may be a farmhouse in the distance, a city skyline on the horizon or a road or path in the foreground.

The term “Urban Landscape” describes photographs of the city taken in the manner of a landscape, using buildings and other man-made features as graphical elements of composition that are treated in the same way the photographer would treat mountains and trees.

STYLES OF LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY

Three styles of landscape photography are recognized - representational, impressionistic and abstract. The representational style is also known as the straight or straight descriptive style.

REPRESENTATIONAL

This style results in pictures that show scenery at its most natural and realistic, with no visual manipulation or artifice. It is a straightforward style - what you see is what you get. Successful images in the representational style are not simple snapshots. Although the photographer adds no props or other components to a scene and does not try to “bend” reality, great attention is paid to composition and detail. Light, timing and the weather are critical elements.

IMPRESSIONISTIC

The impressionistic landscape photographer employs photographic techniques that result in images that have vague or elusive qualities. They are less tangible and more unreal, while still retaining their values that make them landscape pictures. The viewer is given the impression of a landscape rather than the clear reality of one.

ABSTRACT

This style - Abstract - could also probably be referred to as the graphic style, since the components of scenery are treated by the photographer as graphic elements, arranged for their compositional values. Natural elements may be rendered as unrecognizable or almost so. Shape and form take priority. Elements may be juxtapositioned for comparison or contrast, isolated by extreme close-up, reduced to silhouettes by severe underexposure, and so on. Design is more important than recognizable representation

POINTERS, HINTS AND TIPS

This section of PhotographyTips.com contains information intended to improve your landscape imagery. We hope you find it beneficial. Landscape photography is a vast topic, and no one source could ever contain all there is to know about it. It is therefore likely that you will have a landscape photography tip of your own that we omitted or just don’t know about. We invite you to send it in to share with our viewers, along with a picture that illustrates the information. If we use it on the site, we’ll be sure to credit you with the tip and the photography.