MASTER Composition with this ONE essential SKILL

this video is sponsored by case filters capture with confidence click on the link in the description below and use the code Alis for a 5% discount hello there everybody I'm alist Ben and you're watching Express of Photography in this week's video I want to cover the shest way I know to add interest to any of your photographs before that a couple of announcements first of all the Hat uh basically I have not shaved my head in about 3 months and I look like a toilet brush so the hat is to save you any distress of having to look at my sciron hair uh secondly I am going to be at the photography and video show in Birmingham NEC which is between the 16th and the 19th of March 20124 come and join me I'm going to be there uh Saturday Sunday and Monday my talk is going to be at 12: noon on each of those days along with other guys like Nigel Danson Tom Heaton Adam Gibbs a whole bunch of incredible people are going to be there so please come and join us in Birmingham finally before I get to the main part of the video I am running a workshop with Alex Nora in October of 2024 out on the outer hdes of Scotland and we've had a cancellation so there is one spot left this is the first time that Alex Nora has been to Scotland and we're teaming up to take eight lucky participants out into the most incredible landscape and if you want to see how Alex Nora and myself deal with these Landscapes then there is one spot left so why don't you go over to our website in the link below and check out that plus some of the other workshops I also have available for 2025 including Morocco Scotland and of course the North Coast of Spain so after that huge amount of information already what is it that can give your photos a boost to make them more interesting to engage your viewers and to to perhaps uh add some more depth and three-dimensionality well we all talk about leading lines we all talk about perspective there's all sorts of these things that are talked about add infin atom and what I want to do is get to the absolute core of that what is it about successful photographs that make them successful now modestly I'm going to use a few of my own photographs here on the assumption that I think they're not too bad um I've just realized that that may be the flaw in my plan uh right so what is it about landscape photography well of course with Landscapes we have all sorts of different things that are going on all the time the focal length that we choose the dynamic nature of the landscape the dynamic nature of the light but in terms of composition if we strip away all the color and all the fancy uh processing the bottom line is that we have to compose a scene with something in it that's interesting and hopefully some other supporting casts and some context and you know to basically create a frame that feels like it sits in the frame so this is uh quite a famous uh location on the out of heres here uh very close to uh somewhere I'm going to be uh spending a lot of my time uh and basically what we have here is the there's a very clear and obious main event which is the SE stack here with the beautiful hole through the middle we've got some very complimentary light and I've included quite a lot of foreground in the scene um the thing that helps make any photograph significant is to have a sense of here and there IE something that is here and something that is over there now including a foreground is a really good way of doing that there's an immediate sense of here and we know because of perspective and scale scale that that is further away and of course the clouds are even further away so we have immediacy we have then something else that we have something else we have the Horizon and then we have the clouds in the distance so the word I like to use to explain those relationships are transitions we have a transition from here to there and that runs pretty much diagonally through the frame so therefore it's also following the corner to corner uh angle there so the here to there creates that movement through the frame that's a natural way for us to go so what is a transition if it isn't just something that's close to something that's far away and if you think about what we have here we have a number of different interactions between different things so we have the most immediate thing we have Rock to water to rock to water to clouds so that is a transition of content secondly we have a transition of Darker things to lighter things so we have a dark Moody textured corner and we have a bright atmospheric and luminous Corner up in the top right there so that transition of uh dark to light from Rock to cloud from cool to warm those are all transitions this magic word again the transitions of various things to other things within the frame and the relationship between all of these different things and the lines and the connectivity and the implied lines all of these transitions are working together to make the image feel whole now if you have odd things in odd places if there was a big pile of rock up here in the corner looming over that would change the transitions it would enclose things in a different way way there's a consequence to everything that's within the frame and your job as a creative landscape photographer or even an expressive landscape photographer if you have aspirations of total Grandeur is to organize the frame to make it coherent and logical and feel to the viewer as if you have thought about it in the second example from the aisle of Harris we have another uh a square composition here and again if we look at the corner to corner this uh I call it the Sal Tire because it reminds me of the Scottish flag runs right through the middle of the frame there we have various transitions it's quite a dark and Moody image but it's a very graphical one we have the strong uh triangles and lines in the foreground that make it feel very very Dynamic going through to this very luminous midpoint that is a sense of here and there there's a very strong sense of depth in this Photograph I was shooting it 12 mm so I'm right on top of this little uh piece of rock here and we have from angular to smooth we have from rounded shapes to more angular shapes again we have warmer tones in the foreground receding to darker and cooler tones in the background we have more texture in the foreground than we have in the background every time you look at a photograph think about how many different types of transitions you have put in the frame and identify each of those and you will understand your own photography far better now landscape photography is always thought of as big Landscapes and the Majestic and there has been a move over recent years into the more intimate scenes and I'm seeing people writing articles about is intimate the new Majestic or the new Grand landscape uh PR personally here at expressive photography I don't care if we're shooting big Landscapes or small Landscapes intimate scenes or Majestic scenes as long as we do so with the words care has been taken at the front of our brain we should be taking care how we arrange our compositions and understanding how we make up our ideal sense of what an aesthetic is going to look like if I move to this which is a far less Majestic scene it's a much more intimate scene uh this was taken out on the aisle of Lewis just last week when I was running a workshop there we had these Mass of waves coming in maybe uh 50 ft waves uh piling into the North Coast there just exploding on impact and I wanted to try and create an image where there was a sense of scale and depth uh so by including 2/3 of the frame as the breaking wave or just the explosion of the wave I thought that kind of captured the power of it in terms of transitions we have a definite sense of here and there we know that the wave is in front of the rock so that's a very automatic one most of the Luminosity is in the front but I have used the color mixer to change the Luminosity of some of these different tones so the blues have been lightened the greens and the orangey yellow tones have been lightened to just increase their Luminosity to allow us to move into that background a little easier I've kept the Shadows quite dark all around just to kind of create some space and some separation between the foreground and the background but we still have a sense of cool to warm light to dark textured to a different type of texture explosive energetic content to more fixed static content all of these transitions are going to help to uh make the photograph or make the audience rather look at the image and just think well at least you know it feels reasonably well thought out um and I hope it conveys that s sense of energy and power which is what I was wanting to do and finally this is a truly intimate scene um just some stripy patterns on the beach but there was something about this sort of wandering zigzaggy Dynamic diagonal through the frame that I actually really really liked and I was happy to point my camera at it and if photography doesn't nothing else for us but allow us to escape down the barrel of our lens and look at the world in a very small compact concise way then that's a pretty damn good thing for photography to do for us to let us stop thinking about all the worries and pressures that we have in our daily lives whether it's health issues or financial worries or uh all of the Myriad of other things that get in our way on a daily basis the transition from being stressed to Cal is represented in my photography here this dark dark uh quite granular uh texture in the foreground transitioning through to a far more ethereal relaxed open and aery part of the frame in the background that transition is my transition and when we go to the beach and point our cameras at cool stuff we're transitioning from one stressed out guy to hopefully a somewhat less stressed out guy so hopefully in this video you've learned that transitions are a fundamental part of all photography whether you put them there or not the landscape is all about transitions there are things that are here there are things that are there there are things that are textured there are things that are atmospheric there are things are angular and there are things that are soft and smooth next time you go into the landscape think about transitions next time you open up Lightroom and look at one of your own photograph think about how the transitions are acting to help guide you through through the frame are you being led somewhere you don't want to go are there things in the frame that are adding textures or atmospheres or colors that are confusing the theme of the photography that you're trying to make I hope you've enjoyed this uh I do hope some of you can pop in and uh see me and the other uh photographers at the photography show in Birmingham NEC between the 16th and the 19th of March this year uh that would be awesome uh really looking forward to hopefully meeting some of you uh and finally in terms of those workshops uh whether you want to come and visit Scotland with myself and Alex Nora or come to Morocco Spain or Scotland in the early part of 2025 with just me uh go to expressive do photography and check out what Workshop spaces we have available apart from that uh lots of exciting things coming um of I've forgotten to mention there is a 20% of standard ticket price pricing for the NEC show using the uh the code case [Music] tps4 uh we'll put that up on the screen as well uh yeah as I said lots of exciting things coming uh I've Unearthed my IR camera after seeing what one of my participants was doing it in the outer Hees last week and I can't wait to get out with that um we have so much going on in the spring of 2024 and I can't wait to share that with you also thank you very much for watching if you haven't done so please subscribe to the channel jump into the comments is this content useful for you what else would you like to see me doing until next time thank you very much for watching goodbye for [Music] now [Music]

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 3,987

Keywords: Alister Benn, Landscape photography, how to, tutorials, composition, expressive photography, barriers, vision, experience, tutorial, lesson, be better, happy, motivation, inspiration, inspire, Luminosity, Understanding light, Light, landscape, emotion, personal development, contrast, Transitions, Adobe, creativity, dodge and burn, masterclass, Kase Filters, Wolverine, Magnetic, Polariser, seeing, photo book, books, Adobe Lightroom, revolution, seascapes, better, GFX100ii, Fujifilm, Lightroom, processing, Iceland

Id: mLv-BMarxYo

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 10 2024