June 2006
Intermediate to advanced
432 pages
13h 34m
English
Content preview from Digital Photography: The Missing ManualBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 2. Pointing, Shooting, and Basic Composition
If your eyes are bleeding from the technical underbrush of Chapter 1, switch on your right brain. This chapter has little to do with electronics and everything to do with the more artful side of photography—composition.
What follows are techniques that photographers have been using for years to create good pictures regardless of the camera type. These time-honored secrets do wonderful things for digital imaging too. Good composition is essential whether you’re using a $200 pocket digicam or a $3,000 professional camera. When you apply the deceptively simple suggestions in this chapter, you’ll take better pictures (and enjoy taking them even more).
First, a few words about composition.
Composition Explained
Composition is the arrangement of your picture: the interplay between foreground and background, the way the subject fills the frame, the way the parts of the picture relate to each other, and so on. Before pressing the shutter, veteran photographers compose pictures by asking themselves a few questions:
Will the shot be clearer, better, or more interesting if you move closer? What about walking around to the other side of the action, or zooming in slightly, or letting tall grass fill the foreground? Would the picture be more interesting if it were framed by horizontal, vertical, or diagonal structures (such as branches, pillars, or a road stretching away)?
It’s easy to think, “Hey, it’s a picture, not a painting—I have to shoot ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.