Article PHOTOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE and COMPOSITION by Abdu Photography
Your camera and lenses are to your photographs what the paintbrush is to the painter. These are the tools that limit what you can do, and provide you the many opportunities for what you can do.
It’s important to understand the palette of techniques open to you, and to be very familiar with how the tools and techniques influence how your compositions come out.
From a compositional viewpoint, the most important photographic technique issues are:
* Lenses and focal lengths, and their impact on composition
* The way your choice of shutter speed renders motion
* How your choice of aperture impacts depth-of-field and apparent sharpness
In the photograph of a rock formation in the Southwestern desert shown to the right, I used a moderate wide angle focal length to give the illusion that the vast landscape could be seen as a flower.
Your assignment : Choose a lens focal length to create an abstraction of your subject matter. In other words, it shouldn’t be immediately clear to your viewer what the subject matter is, although the subject will likely be revealed upon close inspection.
Exotic lenses are fun toys, and great ways to jump start creativity. I’ve got a great deal of mileage out of using my digital fisheye lens in unexpected ways, as this extreme wide-angle portrait of my infant daughter shows.
Your assignment : Take the weirdest lens you have, and spend all day only shooting with it. Note: I’m not asking you to go out and buy an expensive piece of glass. If you own a fisheye already, great. But otherwise, improvise! For example, hold a small mirror in front of your normal lens, and only shoot with the mirror held up to your lens for the day.
When you set the shutter speed on your camera, you are actually not setting a speed. This setting controls a duration of time: how long the shutter is open. The impact on composition is to change the way motion is rendered.
In the photo of clouds moving by moonlight below, I used a two minute shutter speed to make the nearest clouds seem soft and dreamlike as they flew by in the brisk wind.
Note: You can choose your shutter speed by using shutter-preferred or manual metering. With most cameras, if you want a shutter speed longer than thirty seconds you need to set the camera to manual, and use the Bulb setting along with a remote shutter release to keep the shutter open as long as you’d like.
Your assignment : Make a conscious choice of shutter speed to change the way motion is rendered in a photo. For example, you might choose a very long shutter speed to make motion appear elongated and blurred like my clouds.
The choice of a aperture in an image controls the depth-of-field, the range of distance within an image that is in focus. In the photo of the Yogyakarta, I used a wide-open lens setting to create as little depth-of-field as possible so that only the model was in focus.
Note: The term wide-open means that a large lens opening is selected. You can choose a large lens opening with aperture-preferred metering, or by using manual exposure controls. The smaller the number notated in an f-stop, the larger the opening in the lens. For example, f/2.0 means a large opening in a lens, and f/36 means a small opening in the lens. The larger the opening, the shallower the depth-of-field, meaning the less range of subject that will be in focus.
Your assignment : Create a shallow depth-of-field photo by focusing on the important part of your subject and choosing a wide-open aperture.
Your assignment: Create a shallow depth-of-field photo by focusing on the important part of your subject and choosing a wide-open aperture.
