Visual Elements of Composition
When you look at the scene you're going to photograph, what do you see? The distinction between looking and seeing is perhaps the most important in composition. When you look at a scene, there's a tulip. When you see the scene, it's made up of colors, shades, shapes, textures, lines, and patterns. You see visual elements to be arranged and balanced in your composition. I took art classes when I was in elementary school, and my teacher made us do exercises that I hated. She would give us an object to draw and tell us to draw it upside down. We would have to turn the object upside down in our heads and draw it on paper. It slowed me down, and it made me think too hard, so I hated it. Then she would have us draw it right side up. When we compared the two drawings, inevitably the one I drew upside down was better than the one I drew right side up. Why? Because my brain was thinking differently. I wasn't trying to draw a log on...