Photographic composition elementary chapter

Lead: The photos taken are always typical of failure, but they are rarely regarded as successful examples. Have you ever been so confused? In this regard, professional media photographer Ben Birchall has some simple and effective methods to prescribe the right medicine and make your photos glow.

I worked hard all day, but I didn't even get a photo. Such an encounter is often the most frustrating blow for photographers. Whether shooting outdoors or in the studio, we may encounter all kinds of mistakes, so it is best to prepare in advance. In this article, we will put forward some quick solutions and remedies for the most troublesome problems you encounter when taking pictures.

Do you need it when taking pictures? First aid? The problems mainly focus on composition, focusing and exposure. As long as one of them is not handled properly, it is possible to completely destroy a photo. Only by choosing the correct camera settings can we avoid these deadly? Minefield? . For example, when shooting a moving scene, we should use continuous autofocus mode and always pay attention to the subject in the viewfinder, so as to improve the success rate of taking clear photos; However, if you use continuous focus mode when shooting portraits, you will find that as long as the composition changes slightly, the camera will keep looking for the focus back and forth, and the result is likely to blur the eyes of the characters. If you happen to choose the wrong metering mode, the final photo will be unsatisfactory.

So, when should we switch to spot metering mode? How do we choose the most suitable focus? Since automatic mode can take good photos, why use other modes? Read on, we will explain the most common reasons for the failure of photo shooting, and provide some practical suggestions to make your work full of vitality.

Make your composition more perfect

The ideal picture composition can maximize the visual impact of photos, and it is not difficult to make the right composition. Of course, it takes some thinking to avoid the low-level mistakes we often make when taking pictures, such as pressing the shutter in a hurry and taking pictures of what is in front of us at will.

When taking pictures, we often put the camera in front of us, and rarely take pictures from angles other than standing height or chest-high tripod height. There is nothing wrong with ordinary daily life photos, but you should know that each of us sees the world from the height of our eyes every day, so such a picture is nothing new to anyone. As a professional media photographer, I know very well that this is the last photo editors and readers want to see? What they want to see is something really exciting. Therefore, it is necessary for you to spend more time trying to improve your composition. Don't be reluctant to get your knees dirty. Sometimes shooting on the ground may bring the best results.

But remember, when taking pictures, you should also try to follow the basic principles of composition when lowering the angle of view (if you can get better results from shooting from a high angle). When taking pictures, do you also choose the most suitable lens according to the different subjects? If you have a vast landscape in front of you and winding rivers or other interesting scenery in the foreground, you naturally choose a wide-angle lens to capture them. Learn to look for important lines in the viewfinder that can make the whole picture look more balanced and harmonious, and try to avoid snapping without thinking. You can also try to tilt the camera a little to strengthen the natural lines in the picture? Although this may not be suitable for shooting dignified and elegant artistic scenery, it can sometimes create a different style.

Three golden rules of writing

Impressive photos usually conform to one or all of the three important composition rules, namely: trisection, golden triangle and golden spiral.

The most commonly used method is trisection, that is, the picture is divided into TIC-tac-toe grids with four mutually equidistant straight lines in two vertical and two horizontal directions. The intersection of straight lines will have four intersections. As long as you put your subject or the point of interest in the scene on any of these four intersections, you can ensure that the whole picture has an ideal sense of balance.

The golden triangle is to divide the picture into three triangles with two lines. One line is a diagonal line connecting two corners on the screen, and the other line is drawn from another corner above or below and intersects the diagonal line. This diagonal picture composition is very suitable for shooting buildings, abstract figures and lines in nature.

The golden spiral is an infinite spiral curve, which spirals through the whole picture like a line on a snail's shell. Putting flowers, shrubs or rivers winding along any part of this spiral line in the landscape can add a stronger sense of depth and three-dimensional sense to your photos.