Camera aside, what helps you learn to compose?

[coisasdavida]

Frequent critic and pressure.

This is about a very small sample of photographers, I should say that in advance. I often find myself thinking about what were/are the best qualities in each of the assistants that help me in my commercial work. And the one that stands out the most has a newspaper in the past. You know? Daily exercise of being criticized, having 5 minutes to make 3 different portraits that work in horizontal and vertical ways. This person learned to learn, quickly.

[andrew gardiner]

But alas, upside down landscapes are not considered a new movement in photography.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Rod...w=1424&bih=764

[Heroique]

Daily exercise of being criticized, having 5 minutes to make 3 different portraits that work in horizontal and vertical ways. This person learned to learn, quickly.

“Composition comes down to three considerations,” I heard somewhere. It’s a pretty good tip, especially for one on the fly, as long as you don’t equate the three things for composition. I’m pretty sure it was John Shaw (in Closeups in Nature) whose three considerations are:

1) What’s your subject?
2) How will you frame the subject?
3) Where in the frame will you place the subject?

I think the first step sounds the easiest, but is usually the most difficult – be it LF, painting, sketching, or any other art. To be sure, all three steps are trickier than they sound.

[coisasdavida]

Ok, but should we really stop and consider these things? Or should we give the tricky stuff to our subconscious and play with the "easy" stuff (focus, metering, leveling, etc)?

[Vaughn]

Ah, Andrew! So there is hope for me!

Heroique -- Light is my subject and it fills the frame. so those three steps do not help me much. However, I do find myself thinking more about corners than I do the frame as a whole.

Random examples that I have posted before:

[mdm]

The waterfall is beautiful, I think you posted a carbon from a medium format negative of it once.

[Heroique]

I think it’s nice, too. The portrayal of space is a bit disorienting, in an entertaining sort of way. Speaking of music, I hear a splash of dissonance. ;^)

Vaughn, if it’s possible, can you simply describe your thoughts and/or behavior that led to that composition?

And to address coisasdavida’s interesting question, to what extent did art (intuition) and craft (conscious technique) share the job? Who worked hardest in this case?

[Chuck P.]

By closely examining the edges of the GG and trying to avoid tunnel vision-----an 8x10 piece of mat board with a 4x5 opening cut out helps tremendously.

[jnantz]

painting, sculpture and architecture from between 1900 and world war 2

[jp]

As a teen, page layout. Aldus Pagemaker. A little bit of Corel Draw. Here's an 8.5x11 sheet. Make it neat but emphasize certain things without being obnoxious. Don't use too many fonts. Where do your eyes go when you look at the finished printout?

Now, $2/shot for 4x5 or $7/shot for 8x10 makes me think about composition. Get it right with minimal wasted $ worked well for photographers of all generations past.