Composition

Post date: Aug 30, 2013 4:12:28 PM

Lighthunters organised several diferent photo contests during Summer 2013, mostly tied to the image composition topics. Now we organize the combined contest, wishing to address all important composition facts and elements! To understand the importance of composition in visual arts and photography, we must first discuss perception!

We all know the fear of unknown. It is subconscious directive of our brain. A kind of reflex to feel uncomfort when facing something that we cannot recognize or understand. 

On the other hand, being able to recognize familiar situations, and shapes, lines, colors in visual arts, leads to comfort, pleasure, appreciation, leading us to the term: beauty. And beauty is a visual aestethic term that describes anything that we consider visually highly attractive and that we enjoy looking at. Beauty is product of our familiarity with certain patterns that we easily identify ourselves with.

In visual arts, beauty is directly in relation with Proportions or Ratio between two or more elements! 

And it has been measured ages ago that the most visually appealing ratio between two elements, A and B is 1.618 to 1.

Meaning that: A+B / A is the same value as A / B! 

If we round it a bit, we got 2 thirds to 1, therefore we speak about the rule of thirds!

If we just forget the numbers and go back to looking at photographs, we may find that some photographs are more visually appealing to us than others. And usually it proves that these images that we like more, are based on rules of composition, and elements on them are in harmony,leading our eyes smoothly and peacefully!

Regardless of photographs, we'll find the harmony to be key element of our subconscious recognition in any given situation.

The harmony comes from perfect matched ratio between two elements, and then many other elements, organized by natural rules!

So, finally, we're back to photography composition as the Single Most Important Element of Photography Quality!

It really does not matter if you have best cameras and lenses, best motivest and models, colors, lines, shades or shapes from some dreamland, unless you can and do understand how to compose your images in harmonious way! When you do, you will give new life to any situation, using your camera! 

There are so many articles in magazines and on the internet, manuals, philosophy books, present everywhere. You may feel invited to search and find and read them! Our story here shall be short, and serve only to one purpose: prepairing you to enter following Lighthunters' photo contest! 

Contest Hunt The Composition

1. Simplicity and plans

2. Symmetry

3. Rule of Thirds and The Golden Cut

4. Central composition and Golden Center

5. Perspective and depth

6. Horizon

7. Diagonals and lines

The contest goal is simple: let's work on our abilities to understand image composition and compose better images! This is the very first way to improve in photography and to understand our own and other photographers' work! Finally, we may be empowered to produce images that tell our stories in a much better way!

You may lose nothing but gain a lot by joining our contest this week. It will make you search, explore, experiment, consult and shoot more and better images! It is a challenge for these among us who want to be more creative and better photographers!

We HTL Editors will assign daily from one to several daily awards and awarded images will enter into contest presentation, being displayed here to our dear visitors and members from all over the world! 

Your Greatest Award will certainly be the photographic improvement!