When It Comes To Photography – Composition Rules

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Photography Compositions Reverse Engineering

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Pictures provided by Pixabay.com

Photography Compositions Reverse Engineering

As the title puts it, when it comes to photography, composition rules, are vital to understanding and taking good quality images. I have selected three images to review and take a closer look at three of these main rules, and also cover a few other tips that have been used in the images as well.

Rule of Thirds

The first rule is called the rule of thirds. Shown by the red lines, this rule is essentially taking the image and dividing it into three sections both vertically and horizontally leaving nine squares. At each corner where these squares corners meet is a point that the subject should be focused on at. This image with the sea shell displays a perfect example of this having the shell as a focus point where the lower left point on the image is, circled in green. Another type of rule this image has is something called diagonals where there are diagonal type lines showing movement within the image, shown by the blue lines. This image also has some depth of field to which we will go further into on the third image here.
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ā†” Leading Lines ā†”

This next image we are looking at how it has leading lines in it. Leading lines are where an image has different areas that have straight edges and each of them move together to lead up to the subject. We can see in this image there are four main lines, two on the bottom and to on the top that all intersect on the subject which is the man walking. This image also has a couple of other tricks to it, one is called framing, which is using natural objects to frame the image such as windows or doorways. The framing in this image is created by the walls surrounding the walkway and the square exit at the end of it. The other one this has is patterns. Patterns, Iā€™m sure you have guessed it, are repetitive and/or similar, shapes, colors, designs, within the image. One aspect of patterns is to interrupt it with something different to stand out. In this case we have a lot of semi dark brown walls with a dull finish look, that is interrupted with the subject by his vibrant red.
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Depth Of Field

In this last image we are taking a look at the depth of field that it contains. The depth of field provides a better dimension to the image pulling it away from a flat look. Basically it is where you use adjust your aperture to focus on by sharpening either a subject closer up or further away and putting a blur on the area that is not the subject. In this image the subject being focused on is old wooden boat which is closer up front while the background has received that blur. This image also provides a good example of a technique to fill the frame by having the image getting close up to its subject.
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Review

Okay, so the main three composition rules that we went over with these images were, the Rule of Thirds, Leading Lines, and Depth of Field. As we can now notice, the use of these rules within each of these images has created very professional looks. They of course were combined with other very helpful techniques which has created an even deeper form of professionalism to them. Beginning with these three rules and implementing guides and tricks along the way will without a doubt allow us to come much closer to taking those professional photographs, because, composition rules!

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