A new way of thinking about Composition - Part One

hello and welcome back to the creativity cave I hope wherever you are in the world that you're safe and well and if like me you're gonna be spending a lot of time in front of the computer that was a great time to look at your images and start learning something from them and where we can move to in the future in this video I want to look at images I made in the desert and I want to talk about composition but rather than making up just a regular video about composition talking about rules and all of that stuff there's no shortage of those on the Internet what I want to do instead is introduce the word consequences every decision we make whether consciously or subconsciously has a consequence and consequences are the most important thing that is in any of our photographs it's not the subject it's the consequence of the arrangements and the colors and the transitions and the textures everything comes together to give a consequence that I call an emotional fingerprint so in this first part of a series of videos that I'll be doing to cover consequences I want to look at some images that I made in the desert where everything is sand so we don't have lots of contrasting subjects and all we can be looking at is the geometry and in this case color and how they come together to create an emotional fingerprint of the images so if you find this interesting and useful click the subscribe button and you're doing us a great favor so let's hop off into Lightroom know the first thing I want to talk about is the orientation of the images this is a horizontal I shot it in sixteen by nine and the consequence of this composition is that even though we have all of this beautiful thumbprint type pattern on the right hand side the leading line here for one to a bass horde leads us out of the frame up into this top left hand corner there is a pullback here with this area but it's quite subtle no person like this image because it's quite edgy and it's sort of dissonant and it's quite tense it might not be very traditional but I don't make traditional images so I'm not particularly bothered about that if we look at the same composition in a vertical format you can see how this feels very very different the orientation is emphasizing depth and there's a more natural flow that comes up that left-hand side and then because it's kind of connected up here it pulls us back in to the right to this sort of more empty area that allows us to kind of engage with the image again horizontal images will always emphasize expansiveness vertical images tend to emphasize height and depth now the the thing that humans are drawn to always is luminosity contrast detail texture and then transitions between them now this curving sensual line deep down it's just a simple curve but because of the texture and contrast and detail differences along it it becomes quite complex so it becomes far more engaging than a simple curved line might be the fact that we have good contrast between our light areas and our dark areas we've got good textures all over this image it's got lots of sort of three dimensionality and depth no if we can strip our images down to simple lines so if you can just create a curve and a line and another line that is the basis of your photograph the fewer lines that you can draw your your your compositions with tends to tell you that they're more simple if we look into this one this is quite a different type of image again at mushara sixteen by nine because I kind of like doing things like that we've got very angular pointy details up in the top left hand side here and for a small area of the frame it has a massive amount of pool in terms of we want to look at it this area on the right this Tiger striping of texture and light is a much larger area and it's very complex but there's a repetition to it and that repetition again makes us feel like we understand what's going on here now the consequences of everything here is how much space is something taking up in the frame how contrasting is that how luminous is it how much detail does it have and what processing is is our ability to apportion the importance of each part of our frame because then that allows the viewer to understand how should I be looking at this should I just be looking at the top left-hand corner or is this area important too if I were to bring up a very simple gradient on the left on this area on the right and this is just super super straightforward if I was just to increase the whites what I'm doing is increasing the luminosity of that right-hand side now if I turn it off we want to look at this top left-hand area more and if I turn it on our vision definitely gets drawn over to the right-hand side so the consequence of that one adjustment has has allowed us to change the emphasis of how we view our images so we have the underlying geometry which kind of says this area is more important than that area or this area is more dynamic than this other area and then we have how we process it in terms of the contrast detail luminosity and the color and what that does is it it builds on the underlying geometry with another layer of consequences and every time I touch us later the consequence will be that something will change if I go back into this that gradient there and I take down the blacks that area I'll have to pull that up a little bit because it's creating a little bit of a shadow so just ignore that this isn't about processing this it's just demonstrating the effect by decreasing the blacks I can come in and create more contrast in that area by increasing the contrast in that area and making it more impactful so the consequences I want to look at it more if I take away that gradient we come back to the point where the area has way less contrast there's far less engaging to the eye and the brain and it just diminishes less contrast less impact more contrast more impact we have more desire to look at that now than we did before everything in life is about consequences who is something we learn as we grow up in this particular image it's a it's basically two points of light one is inverted where the shadow is the point and this one is the point of light itself the consequence of introducing sharp angular dynamic diagonals into images is that we create impact the word impact is something you're gonna hear from me so much because sometimes people tend to up everything they up contrast they up luminosity the up saturation the up detail because in this age of increased impact on social media it's something that gets us likes if we want to transcend the like culture and make images for ourselves or resonating we can dial back and be a little bit more subtle sometimes the landscape has a quiet voice and we don't need to shout so in this particular image here anything I was to do to this could change impact also so if I came into the HSL slider if I increase the luminosity of those orange colors if I increase the saturation of those orange colors if I come into my tone curve and deepen these shadows to abstract the image further now we have a situation where as we produced lots of contrast lots of impact but we haven't crossed a line of unbelievable 'ti this thing was glowing in the sunset so it's not a big problem the combination of this beautiful curve and these two points of light creates a very simple yet very graphical image one thing I want to cover here because it's kind of important is if I flip this image horizontally the feel of the image changes this feels very very different to the previous version purely because we have a dynamic point on the left hand side of the frame which is kind of subliminally leaving us up to the second point and then this soft gentle curve on the right hand side kind of seals the thing off this feels kind of more harmonious than that this is a little bit more dissonant the general flow of the image is pushing us up from the bottom right to the top left whereas if we go back into that other version and flip it again this is basically seeing to us start at the bottom left and come up to the top right and the luminosity is moving us in that path the consequences of flipping images can be utterly profound something that you hate oriented one way may suddenly turn into one of your favorite photographs in anonymous places like this this is just a random sand dune in the Sahara Desert somewhere it probably won't even be there anymore just blowing away but we are in a position where we can impact how we read things quite significantly this image here it's very simple it's just a series of textures and it's if this was linear if the bands were horizontal it but have less dynamics than it does the fact that there's a gentle kind of flow of light around these sand dunes and details and textures on the surface of the dunes I think that's allowing us to feel the depth a little bit more this the consequence of this composition is that we have this beautiful wavy foreground these diagonals in the middle ground help to draw the eye through to this area and there's a coolness in this shadow so we have a warm to cool transition the border on the left-hand side also helps to create subdivisions of space that is a wonderfully useful word as well subdividing space because how we apportion areas of the frame to certain things again as a consequence of that and if I were to just for example take the crop tool and take this down to 16 by 9 and make this more foreground orientated then the feel of this image has totally changed the subdivision of space has changed the background is now more triangular in nature the middle ground has taken on more significance the foreground has become massively more important how we crop how we orient it how we subdivide space how we transition between details textures and colors there are consequences to each of these things understanding these consequences opens the doors to your creativity I cannot stress that enough no if I grab these two images and open them side-by-side and turn the lights out they're of the same area of sand dunes the image of the left is a simpler composition in that there are less things in it as soon as we introduce this big triangular and contrast the luminous beautiful pointy sunjoon the dynamics of this image are changed and we now have a situation where we have a bottom left hand point of interest juxtaposing with an upper right hand point of interest which in its own way creates either real or implied connectivity because this one doesn't have that the content sits in the frame in a very different way and the way the brain reads this is from this point here to this point here which creates a slightly backward facing diagonal and the impact of that is calm yeah we've got soft sensual sand dunes in the back juxtaposed with more angular and contrast ajuns in the front on the right-hand side the whole thing just feels more dynamic more connected more part of the same thing one isn't any better than the other they're just different understanding which one of those is speaking to you the most are are making you feel the best it gives you a very good insight into who you are right now because you might prefer one on one day and another on another day and those differences aren't in the content they're in you so the consequence of when and how we look at our photographs changes how they appear I've got a lot of photographs that I made maybe 10 10 15 years ago and at the time I wasn't particularly keen on them and if I look back and them now it's like wow I really like that and it's almost as if it's taken me a long time to mature in terms of my vision to actually understand where I was at that point in time and how I saw the world so again dynamics angles lines soft lines versus hard lines luminous lines versus shadowy curves all of these things have contact and the more you look at your own photographs and try and see areas within the frame that are angular or dynamic or bright or contrasty this gives you insight into the emotional fingerprints of your photographs finally in this particular photograph I shoot squares an awful lot of the time I'm drawn to squares there's just something that they resonate with me really well what we have here is this has worked you know I've already worked this image how the space is subdivided again kind of it creates either tension or release something to engage with or something to to feel calm about how close that point of shadow is to the edge of the frame is a tension point if I were to come in with the crop tool and just argumentatively pull that in that's no changed the feel the image feels a little bit more constrained and compacted and it almost feels as if it sits within itself maybe a fraction better because what we had in the original which was full-frame is this is a little window that creates space around the shadow and by doing that your eye can flow around that little corner of the frame whereas should we crop it then we get into a position where that window is closed that creates a full corner of shadow with highlights in it and it just feels different how it feels is everything how it looks is one thing but how it feels is more important one final thing I do want to do with this photograph is understand the implications of the shadows if I open the shadows here we see an awful lot more detail and these white blowing sand it's gusting off the top of the Jun's there and it makes it more explicit and luminous and it makes more of an event of that if I darken those shadows then the the sand blowing off there it's just a little bit more mysterious perhaps the consequence is the more explicit something is it's more obvious the less explicit it is the more mysterious is it if you show everything then the viewer doesn't have to engage with your photograph particularly very long because they kind of get it if you make things a little bit more mysterious a little bit less obvious then they're kind of forced to peer into the details so the the big thing with any of these photographs is to realize every single decision we make is critically important but we don't have to think about them too much we don't want to be agonizing in the field about oh well should it be that way or should it be that way I believe that we have innate aesthetic appreciation I believe that we can feel when we like something and the big secret is not to let rules guidelines other people's opinion can it get in the way of how you like it when we're cooking you wouldn't ask somebody else to say well how much chili should I put in here you kind of put enough in for your taste and if you like it that way great that's probably not the best analogy but never mind so I hope you found this useful I'm gonna be sitting in front of the computer an awful lot over the coming weeks and I'm going to be bringing you consequence videos I'm going to be bringing new vision and light videos there'll be another one along with next week with Adam Gibbs and I'm hoping to get the one up from Mark Adam asked in this coming month as well so if you found it useful do the old click the subscribe button thing and thanks very much for watching be safe whatever you are I hope everyone's surviving and is taking this opportunity to try and do something creative and you know that we can start sharing some of these images in dark times that just remind us that there's a world out there there's beautiful that we all care about where we find ourselves and can create and be expressive so thank you very much for watching and I'll see you again next week [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 7,701

Keywords: Lightroom, Photography, Alister Benn, Landscape photography, how to, tutorials, compose, composition, lines, angles, curves, leading lines, education, educate, expressive photography, barriers, vision, experience, tutorial, lesson, teach, professional, be better, at, happy, motivation, inspiration, inspire

Id: UeZgMfsXLCk

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2020