Weekly Assignment: Experiment with Composition

[PWS-Staff]

The best way to work out your style is to experiment with your composition and see what speaks to you artistically. Do you feel the need to be in total control of every aspect of the image or can you shoot on the go, capturing great images to tell a story? Try creating some formal, posed photos where you are in control of the whole scene and try some photojournalistic photos where you capture the scene as it unfolds with little posing and control. Regardless, you need to be able to tell a story, and this means you need to know exactly what your subject is and why it is important. Using the basic rules of composition, you can draw the viewer to the part of the image you want to emphasize. Choose a photo that has composition you really love and post it to the Web site to share.

When people look at your images, or any image, the eye is drawn to the parts that are in focus first. By using a shallow depth of field, you can make sure that viewers are looking at what you want them to, no matter where it is placed in the image. This moment was captured using an aperture of f/2.8, which blurred the background and kept the focus on the hug, and a shutter speed of 1/200 to make sure the action was frozen. Because there was quite a lot of light, I was able to use an ISO of 640, keeping the noise to a minimum.