97 Photo Composition Techniques & Tips: 4-Step System

1. Stronger Photo Composition - System Introduction: Could I add Welcome to the stronger photo composition for step system? Very excited to bring you this on Skillshare. This is not for techniques. This is more than 100 different techniques and tips that is not data overwhelm you or impress you that there's so many of them out there. I have the four-step system, breaking them all down, distilling them into four different groups. And the idea behind this four-step system is like composition stacking. If you choose one or two or three from H of those four groups, the four steps, it's in chronological order. Then all of a sudden you have multiple different compositional techniques within the one photo and it looks so much more powerful, engaging because that is the next level in your photography is understanding the visual hierarchy and designing your files. You're creating images now to break based four-step stand for it. Number one, prepare and position the camera. We're talking about camera height subject to the lens distortion, perspective distortion, forced perspective, symmetry. Lots of different types of symmetry theory. I've got 26 different examples and techniques, therefore, where and how you position the camera and yourself, angles hot, all that sort of thing. Step number two is positioned the subject in the frame. So we, we've all heard, you need a hero United main focal point in a, the main subject in the frame. Not all firearms have a hero, but you want the main point of fixation for the person looking at your pharmacy to pick up and go to a straightaway off-center oscillation, fill the frame focal point left to rot. 16 more different techniques in step number three, position the supporting elements. So these are the other visual contextual elements, focal points for grind interest, juxtaposition, minimalism, style lettering. I got 29 different techniques there. Step number four is compositional mobile editing tools. You want to go in there and do your cropping. You want to change your perspective. You want to localize editing brought and dark and saturated mute colors. The sort of things you could say once you start applying several of these from each of those steps, all of a sudden you have just such a stronger, more engaging, the powerful fire that you'll be proud to post, share, and even print. So let's get into it then. Velar. 2. 4-Step System - Quick Win: Could I you've probably land on this page because you saw that title that you can get these tiny Macau and you've thought rip a fantastic because I would love for you to go and watch 34 hours of video that I've put together for you through this whole course, realities for you and for course grad is locked myself in instructional designers. It's really hard to get people to complete it, and I want you to get the most out of it. So what I've done is I've created that 2080 rule where 20% of if you get 80% of the result, that's what I've tried to design this page four, I want to give you some direction to go to the most important bits. So you can see he order to get the most out of the system under one hour. So basically the first one is watch the lesson, the principles and elements of design. Because what I want to do is try and encourage you to become more visual, literate and understand that photos is actually visual communication. You're communicating something, as I talked about in the introduction to the system. It's all about having a photographic intention. And then composition is how you're going to tell that story. Reflect what it is that you wanted to catch up and communicate that. That's a good one to 73 minute rate. Next I have the introduction to each of the steps, the first step system go and have a look at the introduction. It's just a real summary of everything that's in below that. And then at the bottom I have two bonus articles. They're just think of really, really handy. One is head to become that attentional photographer and the other is storytelling because both of those combined really help with your composition. Generally speaking, in how you capture, in how you set up the same watching to understand what are you trying to communicate and then how are you going to communicate it? To provide that narrative, visual cues, that sort of thing. You'll just, the rest of it will come easy to, you can say he, the three main outcomes that you'll receive at the system is if you dedicate a little bit of time, one hour, that's the first one is just wanted you to get to a point where you just intuitively use some of these techniques and tools in this comprehensive resource that you have here. Now, I want you to be able to look at a scene, look at a photo, a photo opportunity and got IK position myself, camera, distance or the angles, all that sort of thing. Subject. That's where I want to put the subject. Whereas the background, what's the background doing? Two, I need to read just by position. I need to move things around, take things out. How did they all interact with each other and then the editing side of it, how do I emphasize that composition really manipulate the visual journey of the person looking at this photo of yourself in years to come looking back at your memories. Number two is I want you to be more strategic as an outcome of this. Number three is I want you and I've got these activities listed below. Number three, I want you to go and be able to break down your own photos and your photos that inspire you and your favorite photos. So that leads me to the activities. So you can say he activity number one. This is a great exercise to practice finding that unique perspective. Practice positioning yourself, changing different lens opportunities with its attachments or selecting a different lens, that sort of thing. Looking at how different fields of view changed with how many elements are included in the see what you can take out, but just moving around, capturing the same subject non different ways. It's just a fun exercise to do that. Next, activity number to grab a photo on your camera roll. What I want you to do is use some of those editing techniques that you'll learn a little bit later. Probably familiar with a lot of them. Hopefully there's a bonus ones in there you weren't aware of. And then similar to this, same here I have is I want you to try and edit it so you have for completely different photos of photo within a photo, crop different ways. And unless you to edit different ways so that your eye gets drawn to different areas. You can say here at the top left photo, the light bouncing off the white lines leads you through the S-curve to the sunset. But then the one on the bottom right is converted to a black and white. Takes out the RH at the end of the road, that bright area of adult that off. And then I kind of contrast and indulgent, barren to really emphasize that area on the right side of the image set, crushing the blacks on the lift your eye moves across to that area. So that's activity number two is just play around with the editing and try and do that. Number three, activity number three is, this is a fun one, is to look at a photo, break it down, grab a book where it's got a list of all the techniques and tools and just look at it and go, okay, I'm going to break this down again. What is it that works for this photo? Look for those obvious or subtle compositional techniques and different things that they've done to try and attract your eye. Fixation, bring your eye to that one area and then the eye movements where you pick up on next, What's the visual hierarchy? How did they achieve that? What's the emphasis? What's the size, the color contrast old has sort of cool stuff. And once you stop writing those down and using that list, the comprehensive list that you have in April, It's probably the easiest twice that again, through the hole. Video lessons, the e-book is a graduate, you can just print it heavily in front of you and scroll down and practice on that photo. There you go. Just really quickly to summarize, write that article, principles and elements of design. Readily introductions to each of the four steps. Have a look at those two bonus articles on storytelling any digital photography. Think about the outcomes of the system that I want you to. I want you to intuitively apply composition or don't want you to be hung up on all these techniques and force, these techniques and principles. Just the end result of this is that you'll just set up the same. And then if you get stuck or you're getting the creative, then you can go back to these comprehensive resources that you have. Number to strategically, I want you to be able to strategically edit a photo and control the attention of the viewer as well. Second outcome. Third outcome. I want you to be able to break down, analyze your own photos and those that inspire you. You can easily do that under an hour and get the most out of the rest of the system. Didn't go through each step of the system. And what's h of those videos and the top of the page and then have a look at all the texts underneath. Because we all learn differently that we don't forget the social role where you can jump on there and share your experiences, shapes of photos. And I'll continue the conversation with you in it. Bye for now. 3. Step 1 - Position The Camera - 32 Tips: Welcome to step number one, prepare and position the cameras. This is exciting. This is the really the first thing you do after you've worked at your intention. But for the photo, what you want to try and communicate. This is the first step to how you try and communicate that which is really exciting. And this is the step that you have the most control. Like I said before, this is where you start becoming worrying, intuitive. Don't get bogged down in each of these steps. Don't have to include all of them, would be impossible. You include all of them. But this is where you can change the position of your camera and the position of yourself in the scene. So you can change, you can introduce roll pitch, your height, distance, all these sorts of things with the camera position. But you can also position yourself around the scene. Just for typing a couple of steps. One side can change the background, completely changed the background. One of the things for landscape photography is something like that where you've got a hill, you shooting towards the hill a couple of steps, not gonna make much difference. But if you shooting family members, you're shooting flowers, macro, whatever it is, just a little bit of attention to the day. Tell me your position can make a big difference. Architecture, getting up close, changing the tilt will change the perspective that I'm gonna cover a lot here as perspective as well as how to create different depths and that sort of thing. So let's get straight into it. So we're going to throw all of them firsthand. So we have, what have we got? We've got camera Heights and changing the dominance of the subjects and make them look more dominant or submissive based on the camera height where you're holding the camera also changes the intersect the intersecting Beckman elements. So where the horizon is, make sure it doesn't cut someone off through the head. Also, cityscapes, if you take photos at the end, the beach. And you, if you've got a, if you're at sea level, the actual man of Canvas, if the frame that manifest distance in a frame taken up by the water can be quite minimal. But if you get up into an elevated position up in the same drew to happen and Boardwalk of some sort. You can fill out the whole Two-thirds of full of water. If you take photos of the bracket, is that the surface wherever changing the height of where you are, your position, you can make a big difference subject to lens distortion. We're going to talk about that how getting the and close can make things look bigger, things farther away look smaller. Lens compression kind of debunk a myth that a changing to a telephoto on your phone or adding a telephoto lens will actually make the background compressed. So I wanted to talk about that one. Perspective lens distortion, different types of lenses like fisheye, tilt distortion. Then we're gonna get into symmetry. So we're going to talk about vertical symmetry, horizontal spiral, radial crystal. I can never pronounce these crystallographic mosaic symmetry. Then we're going to talk about some balance things. We're going to talk about asymmetrical balance, which is, which is also known as informal balance, which is quite interesting. Different perspectives looking up, shooting down at ground level, lighting we're gonna cover. So we're going to talk about direction, strength and quality of the light, hard light in middle of day shadows, how that works? It works. I love it. That's an area that I really enjoyed for the street lighting. Site lighting headache can create texture and depth. And next we're going to talk about a couple of different things. Flat lays the bird's-eye of taking the photos. You said it's really popular for food, for restaurants, reflections, and I'm going to talk about a few things over the shoulder. That third-person perspective like introducing you into the same, making you feel like you're there, which is one of my favorites. A couple of upskill ones, case dining, which you've probably never heard of and we'll talk about that vanishing point, which is He's definitely heard about this one. You've seen these photos with the train tracks. They've got the parallel lines that kind of turn into a diminishing point and a point of convergence. Convergence. It's over that one different two-point perspective, three-point perspective, which is kind of a variation of the vanishing point. Diminishing scale, perspective, atmospheric perspective, forced perspective, which is where it looks like that your hand at and you look like you're holding the Eiffel tower in the background. And then we're going to go into vertical and landscape orientation, square different aspect ratios and why you would choose certain ones. A couple of real estate ones, corner to corner. So shooting from one corner of a room to another corner of a room. So just shooting started a wall. That's totally different composition. They're shooting towards spice, shooting into the room. Or if it's an open plan, leaving shooting into space or kind of bring the viewer in and have them wondering what's around the corner. And then when there's a series of photos is trying to connect these rooms to say I had. So they walk out of that photo and into that photo. So that's pretty cool. Then I'm gonna go into a bit of a capture technique in panoramics. I'm going to talk about vertical panoramic and a walking panoramic. The reason why I've included those in a composition is because it needs to be aware of the capabilities if you find Nemo, want to take it back out wide angle photo. But a panoramic might be better than knowing how a panoramic or change the composition. You can add more elements or the last one I stopped angles so it's rotating the phone and this is one that I struggled with for a long time. Some of my photos worked, most of them didn't and I didn't really understand, sir. Researching that one. I'll be able to help you with that and understand when it's the right time to do the Dutch angle. So the way I'm going to do with these, so I'm going to bring up a photo and bring up a total. He just sat at the top while I explain it and then I'll get back to the fido and and show you and give you a chance to look at that photo. Camera height changing dominant to the subjects. Having pain from a higher angle with a wide angle lens looking downward towards the subjects that can look very small. Capturing from above can make them look kind of submissive as touched on earlier. And then from a lower angle they look more dominant and I look larger than law. This is my son. I explained anyone I was doing it. He put a just absolutely nowadays facial expressions just further emphasize it. Another example is in other genres, food photography. So if you're taking a photo of a hamburger and he kept to the hamburger at eye level. It will look like looking down at a hamburger, nothing exciting. But then when you capture the photo at it, strike edits at typo top-level, then that can make a big difference. Beta is still taking it from a lower angle. All of a sudden Nala emphasizing the heights of the hamburger. You can say all the fillings and emphasizing the structure, all the details in there. Then you get a little lost sliding. And you can see by changing the angle where changing the whole storytelling, we're changing the whole message that you want a hamburger, you want that to be just delicious if people want to get it at eight, didn't get right into it another headway you say mostly bond is not as linear as appetizing sound. The next one for the full height here is looking at the background. So looking at the background, he just conscious of way different elements are in the frame and how they all work with each other. So in this example here, we have the horizon and on the left we kind of disappear in the water. This is me with my two boys and they are kind of funny. I talk Lucy. And especially on where it gets dark capsids, just a display benzene with waterline there. Then the one on the right? Yes, we're a little bit closer and tighter crop. But because our heads is above the waterline there at brights that horizon and we oscillates us. It makes stand out a little bit more. But you can see there my oldest Sunday, it's cut strike through his head and that's not ideal either. Just something to be, to be mindful of and look at with the horizons, okay, the next one to look at with camera height is expanding the fulcrum. I touched on this briefly earlier, you can say the final and the lift day because of taking these Fido at sea level, the amount of landscape or the, sorry, the amount of space taken up by the water is quite minimal. It's about one item of that photo. And then on the right because I've got an elevated position, two-thirds of the photo is the water. So that may excite a big difference as we'll touch on later when we get into the rule of thirds and things like that by making the federal and the rod, but making two-thirds of that photo all about the water and the waves, they're in the whitewash. That is the story that makes it look a bit more rugged. The one on the left, it's more about the textures in the same textures in the rock. This is called lizards hit this rock. Moving on to the next one here we're gonna touch on a distortion one. This one's called subject to links distortion. Basically, phones have a built-in wide-angle lens, the native camera, the main camera in our smartphones, whether it's Android or iPhone, the main lanes is the one that's the best quality. Typically has the largest aperture. I'm not very good technical, but basically that has a wide field of view which is very practical. It's fantastic. One of the disadvantages of that fine at, but also it can be used creatively to your advantage to ease. The closer it gets to your subject, the larger it looks and the background looks smaller than the he could say with this squirrel, the nose looks big, deliberately focused past that and focus on the eyes because it's so important to connect with the eyes of not only people but animals. And you can say, I love that. The proportions are all thrown out of whack and that creates an interest and it creates an interesting focal point to the photo that's subject to length. And no doubt you've seen at a beautiful sunset, lift up your file to capture this onset and go, oh my gosh, it's such a supporting this sun is so far away, it's so small, So that's the subject to lens distortion. Another thing with this is when you get up nice and close, when you focus on something that's not even close to the lens, they'll be in sharp focus and then what's behind it will be out of focus. You don't have to use law of focus or portrait mode. You can create that subject to lens distortion just for getting nice and close to that subject. Now this is one where I have a chat to your photographer friends who have invested in all the big expensive key. And I'll talk about flattening the background. Now, flooding the, flattening the background. It's not what most people think. Most people think that. To flatten the background, you simply need to put on a telephoto. I zoomed links on your phone. Now, smartphones now we can get some crazy and Zoom are mainly interested in optical zoom. The phone I'm using has three times optical zoom, which I love is looking at this photo here with the same Helga Ford improvise one. He's taken at a distance of my mountain bark with a background behind it. I'm taking it from a distance. Number two is the same wide-angle lens built-in, the normal 19th camera. And then this is basically just photo number one and I've cropped it in editing, so just use the inbuilt editor and a corrupted, that is number two. Number three is the same position. So I'm a good study, made us away from the mat bark, put on a 12 times lens attachment, just distribute optics, fixed zoom lens. And you can see there it is actually better quality. You can say a bit more sharpness day and I have edited to try and remove some of the chromatic aberration and increase the contrast. All sorts of things that does happen with a lens like that. So you can see by just using the wide-angle lens at a distance, the end result with the background and the size of the background elements is exactly the sign. You don't need to use a telephoto lens. With a telephoto lens means that you can zoom in, and it's all optical sets not digital zoom. Equality will be better. Number four, now within five meters of the metal block, and you can say the background behind the mountain block looks totally different. It's small, it's distant. That's the wide-angle lens that is doing that, sir. You can say that when when when someone says it's flattening the background, that's bicycle compressing the background. That's basically what it means is that you're shooting from further back and the background elements just a position differently spacing of different lenses. Here we go. This one here, the fisheye lens, fantastic. I love it. It's not something you use all the time, but it's creative and it changes the whole look of the photo. Again, you're looking at the main visual anchor. You're looking at the supporting elements and having official unashamedly distorts everything and that's cool. So this sort of photo, if you want to have your mindset, Jake's smack bang in the middle. Now, what I'm talking about lens distortion is 70 different, different ones. We're going to touch on rectilinear lenses. There is a fixed wide angle lenses which most of the best smartphones makes the lines and the follow-up piece stripe, which is fantastic, a lot of algorithms and software that go into producing that sort of result. Curvilinear lenses, the fisheye lenses like this one that has dramatically and unashamedly banks those straight lines in the photo. Barrel distortion is one that you typically get with lenses locked that 148 times where it starts to bend outwards from the center. The reason it does that is it's attempting to force and squeeze a wider field of view onto a photo image sensor that's capable of Ireland, the normal field of view that the camera has. The other is pink cushion distortion. This is where you have striped lenses in a photo, it starts at bent inwards from edges of the frame. The zoom lens attachments the field of view is smaller than the image sensor and needs to be stretched to fit the frame set. Hopefully I didn't get too technical or they're only with that one. This is what you'll be, you'll be familiar with perspective, the tube distortion. This is where you find yourself indoors and a cathedral is a perfect example because you knew Danek random level. The roof is further away from you, so it's smaller than the floor. The floor is wider. And as you look up at typers and credits that diminishing point where the two parallel lines. So that's quite, quite common. The wire around these that are recommended my real estate photography workshops is to try and get an action potential is not practical. But indoors in your home, try and get halfway between the floor and the ceiling. Position your camera exactly halfway. Half the phone perfectly strikes at it. It's not tilting forward or backward. And you'll get a nice shot like this one on the right. Now, in this example, this one on the right, I edited this to make it look the way it does. And instead for I'll show you the tools how to do that. It's fantastic. So you could use that was thought to either correct it or further tilted and create this distortion from nothing saved me. If you don't have that distortion, you might want to make it look really gray and big and messy. And that kind of happens when you have that tilt distortion. Now be mindful that photo on the left if the United States comparing the one on the left and the one on the right, the one of the rod I hit the Crop quite a bit out of the photo. I've lost all that ceilings. So when you do correct it, it will zoom in and crop in your loser Fabian. If you're taking a photo, trying to definitely nibbled digital zoom, never pinch and zoom with the photo, but try and be in a position where you overshoot, if that makes sense, to have a wider field of view of what you really wanted the firewall. So that gives you some, some leeway when he got to do some perspective correction and crop the photo later on, we're gonna get into symmetry now, which is really exciting. This is an example of vertical symmetry. Basically you can split this further in half. And if it's see-through paper and you fold it in half, they kind of look the assignments and married image. Basically, this is the kind of photo that's just very simple. It has simplicity and aesthetically pleasing because it's visually balanced. It's very easy for the viewer to interpret what the intention with this photo, because you don't end up being distracted by different things happening, which is really cool. Now horizontal symmetry basically that is where water isn't. Perfect example where you'll have something reflected in the water spiral symmetry. So I've put spiral symmetry and radial balance heat together because this spiral creates that balance in the photo. The same thing can be created with a flower where you have two petals and they extend from a central point. So extending from the center point here we have a spiral goes around and around and around and extends outwards. Credits that lovely balanced. Even if you imagine a bicycle wheel with the hub in the middle and all the spokes coming out of it That's still has that same radial balance. These lines are lucky. A magnet grabbing the viewer's attention and making it unavoidable to drag their attention. Back to that central point or start from that central point and work your way outwards. It's typically typically clean, distraction, free and simple, powerful photos. I love spiral fido stay cases familiar. They have kind of a calming, almost hypnotic effect in and just loved the cleanliness of the photo and simplicity. So when we're living in London, this was a Queen's House. And, and just start privileged to see so many beautiful buildings and look for spiral staircases. Luck piece that we just don't say too many of hearing Melbourne. This one was a little bit different. I've never heard of this one. I was doing my research about symmetry and balance and crystallographic and my sake, I still, I still can't really work at how to apply this. But basically this is where our fan that it's similar to patterns and repetition. It can be without a visual anchor. It doesn't need to have any emphasis or dominance. The elements are equally representing the whole frame, equally spaced and balance heavy, a uniform look to it for me when I was having a play around with this width is rock wall. Fat guy from looking for opportunities where you have a monochromatic or, or complimentary colors. It brings that balance and makes it all kind of blend. And nothing grabs your I O apart from Hawaii, from everything else where I can see myself using this more often is in a double exposure fido where you have this as a background texture so you reduce the opacity blended over the top of another photo. And it will help to create that balance. And I touched on this quite a bit, the balance, that balance is a big part of composition so that you can have that harmony. Aesthetics to the photo. Here's another example of balance. Asymmetrical balance will also known as informal balance. Basically. Now, this is isometric. It's not symmetrical where symmetrical you split down the middle and it's mirrored and I look the same. They have a cool visual way. They'd either side of it. This one, even though it's not, the sign has different elements. It still has the same balance, doesn't it? That can be different sizes. You can see on the right day, the big tree is very different to the total building Eureka tower there on the left. But because the uric a tower has their space on the other side and then we have some other trees there. The combination of what's on the left side of the frame is equal to that big, large blob of Vitruvius on the right. And then we'll go down the bottom. We've got the lake and the foliage days that creates balance. Its debt is more balanced rod across the bottom so that it doesn't take our attention. So we're just looking at the balance at the top there. And I think that is quite nicely balanced. We're gonna get back to a couple of perspective ones. And this one here is looking up now for you all. I'm going to touch on a couple of heath perspective because we all live our lives viewing the world at a higher level. And that same world and common saints that we say as soon as we apply a new perspective, it's instantly more appealing, grabs our attention. This is the location in Melbourne where I used to run regular in-person workshops. It's a really famous laneway with graffiti every week like guided. It'd be totally different. It was it was, it was fantastic. 75 different colors that you'd have thousands of people then they photographing every day. One day I'll just encourage people are just looked up and so these clouds got past and I said, Look at that, look at the Texas, looked at the lighting. I had one of the attendees sites to me that that was actually their favorite photo that I took for the whole day. It so many times I've taken people are these exact location. This was surprising, that was her favorite and having applied to easily go and have a coffee afterwards and play around with the photos. When we actually tilted this photo and created that visual tension. It's because it's not, it looks kind of got leading lines going everywhere and diminishing points. And then you've got the contrast, the juxtaposition of the soft clouds with the hard architecture in the lines of the building there. You've got different tones, so much going on in here. But most importantly, this image is about the unique perspective. And looking up. Next one I have here is shooting a grand level. Now this is one I loved macro photography. I love viewing the unseen getting dance. A grand liberal forces you to kind of take your time. Focus on the data's of what's going on or Angie and it's good fun. I mean, don't get down with my kids, my dog, Lucy, the ESOL before. And it's just so fun to get down to their level and see the world as they do, forces you to slow down. And me getting backup takes a little while so I can enjoy it for a bit longer. Shooting a grand level just opens up so many different options and things that you don't normally say. One of the things that I love about macro photography that apply around with ease is intimate landscapes is what I call it. And I'm not, I'm not fantastic at it yet, but I'm still enjoying playing around with it and that's half the fun, isn't it? All right. So we're gonna get into some lighting once he'd, you might be thinking, why is this in a composition course? As I mentioned in the very style in the introduction, there's certain things that attract our attention and that's really important in composition, understanding what attracts hold and God's our attention and Lot is a big one. You've no doubt heard that photography is all that beautiful lighting. It's the sun moves across the sky. It provides different lighting opportunities, different strengths, different direction. Clouds are amazing. Clouds create that diffused soft lighting without this harsh shadows and some photos like this. These are a couple of leaves that I held up and having that backlog credit that silhouette of the first leaf against the other. And it was just an amazing shot at the time. Other examples you can look out for overhead lighting. So the whole bathroom photo where you got the recruiting lights, where the shadows are underneath from their from their forehead, reception photos with the pivot on the dance floor and you've got the spotlights and people who will dance or walk in-between pools of lights I'm looking for lighting can make a big difference. Not only well, it can also be in landscape photography. People will go and use photo appeals that, That's fantastic app to anticipate light direction that have a given scene at a given time. And use that to playing with a subject will be the dance and all the supporting element. Next one I want to cover here is hard lighting shadows. A lot of people will say, you can only shoot in golden arrow blue hour, which is the hours before and after sunrise and sunset. But I love getting out in the middle of the day when the sun is up nice and high and looking for opportunities like this where there's real strong shadows. They're waiting for a subject to come in there and, and kind of interact with that environment. You can create some shots like this. This is what I've mentioned before is by stacking all these different compositional techniques and tools together. Here I've got some diagonal lines, I've got scale. I've got lots of different things happening in this one photo and we'll talk about that a little bit more. Next, I've got sidelining by SAP or having some side lighting. You can capture all the textures that are in there because law, it will hit the areas that are a bit higher in the subject and then shadows where it's blocked from that side lighting so that creates depth to the photo. This photo here would look very, very different if it was shocked with the light behind me and filling in all those dark hair. I love shadows because credits mood, mystery. But it also creates texture and form and makes things look more three-dimensional with that depth elements. That's a reason while I loved side lighting and directional lighting. It creates that three-dimensional look. So again, we saw this before. This was lizard's head. Danny boy in Victoria is a great spot to photograph. Next one here is the flat line. So this is lockup, mentioned various stuff. This is a popular one for foodies and designers to put elements together on a table and shoot from directly above the iPhone. Quite some time ago, I think, as iOS 13, when you have rule of thirds turned on and they'd hold it down, pointing downwards, the fine pointing downwards. It actually has these cross hairs that move around and it'll align. Since you've got a perfectly level without the line, it is nothing like a yellow. And it adds fantastic site. You know, that you don't have any of the perspective issues you shooting directly down a flat light composition. Again, we're going to use lots of different techniques in the one photo. So we have our main subject, the largest element, Pleistocene. Then we put our linear contextual supporting elements using spice lines, direction triangles wherever we want, the layering, we could throw them all in there and then concentrate on things like color and texture and flatlines is actually a great way to practice composition. Because he didn't introduce depth because there is no depth, It's just two-dimensional you're shooting there. It can concentrate on compositional techniques without being overwhelmed with all the extra ones that create depth reflections. I love reflections. I love getting down nice and low in the ground. And I've actually been guilty of walking around with a water bottle in sunblock cash, credit, bio puddle. There are some fits as the apps that they reflect is a really good one and that you can use to do this with an app. You can create it, but actually using real paddles is the best way to guard. You can create a mirrored symmetry from nowhere using reflections. You've got that horizontal reflection. You can use reflections in the windows of buildings and you have that vertical reflection. And I don't have to be completely mirrored images. You can have just a window with a part of reflection, the name where it gives a bit of a hint or a clue to another part of the story that's happening in that environment. For those street photography photos, with a photo like this, where you have a reflection, it's also works really well. If you have the person, the subject, whatever it is, have them kind of isolated from the background. This kind of blending backlog in luck in this scenario, he worked really well over the shoulder perspective. This is a fantastic want to really get the viewer involved in the photo and have them thinking. Elicit their imagination has no imagining self in that location. And it can also work as a visual anchor. So you're looking at this boy and you're looking at his headphones. This gala was so loud that it was quite appropriately. Them on the AI guys, they Anaconda adds to the whole mood and you're wondering what this scholar isn't this festival, you wonder what it's all about. And it just adds to the story a couple of other things with an over the shoulder third-person perspective is that he has actually created an implied line of sight. So you're looking at where he's looking, has a bit of intimacy as well because we're close to him. And that's where you can experiment with this technique and you can try and get closer to the shoulder. You can get further back workout where you want to position them the height of the frame. You want them to take up the whole edge of the frame or just a little bit technical tip, you can tap on the person to make them in focus and the background add effect is heat like I have, or I could have tapped on an element in the background and then had this, This boy out-of-focus and that might have changed the whole look and feeling and change the whole stories at the moment. The story is about him. If I change that composition in and have them in blue, sorry, in focus and blur, then the story becomes about Dame and it changes the composition. Again. This is a compositional technique that I don't use very often. And when I have, I've always, I don't know why I've always turn this into black and Watson, I'll do these because case dining is basically get up really close to something told. You, tilt the camera out. The smart fired you tilted backwards so that you're shooting up. And every time it always comes down to the textures, the lines and that sort of thing. But converting it to a black and white. I actually did this in light room and use the colors channel and there was a bright blue sky. Using the color channels, I was able to go in there and completely dark and the blue channel, which was just the sky. And that might describe black and case-study distortion is basically that you get up nice and close and then you tilt the camera, that you can do this from the top as well if it's safe and you're brave enough, you can hang over the edge of the top and he did the same thing. So you tilting it back towards the buildings. They're just tilting strike down to the grant, pointing down, but then you just tilting a little bit and that's called case-study. Now, this perspective correction tools that are covering step number four, that you can fix this and he can make it look more parallel as the ISA's. Or you can further exaggerated for that creative effect as well. Alright, I've covered this a couple of times, the diminishing point where you have two parallel lines. But there's also known as converging lines or point of convergence, single-point linear perspective. It has so many different, different names, but basically, it's a great way of creating that depth because things that are further away, whether you're using a wide-angle lens that's subject to lens distortion we talked about before. But basically, even with that, we're just standing there at the beach and we're looking at their peer. Things that are further away to a naked eye also looks smaller. So that's why this works. Now from a practical point of view, you can also stay in the middle of the road and look down the strike road. And you'll notice that the edges of the rope will actually come to a point in the distance where they converge. It's, it's actually a really cool, fun compositional technique. So what we're talking about perspective and talking about those vanishing points. This is an example of shooting a building at the corner. And you can see that the parallel lines are basically the straight front each or the bottom of the building and the top roof line. And when you have two sides and that's when he shooting a corner, you had two sides to the photo. You actually have two different converging lines happening there. And that creates depth. And it's something I'll talk about quite a bit because we don't want to have just two-dimensional boring flat photos. And another example, he is the three-point perspective. In addition to those two sides that we can say, but getting down low and a car, especially a masculine looking car like this, getting down low. And we talked about this at the very first tip. Getting down low can make it look more imposing. And we have theater diminishing perspective up towards the top layer. So that creates a third one, that's called vertical linear perspective. That third month. While we're still talking about perspectives, I've got a couple of AUC curves libor actually. This one is diminishing scalp perspective. Now this is something that happens, just happens when you take the photo, but it's something that by changing the angle of your self in the same. Or you might have a distance multi-step background part, just moving around a little bit and go. You've got those trace. They're not too far away, 20 minutes behind. But if he just turned around and I'll shoot from this angle, then you've got trees that have 50 meters away. But changing your position around the subject, if you have the luxury of doing that, you can bring in more of these diminishing style perspective, which is really cool. So basically at brines perceive objects that are smaller the further away I'll touch on that with the last one, creates a sense of depth and shifting source from the foreground to the background makes it look more three-dimensional layering technique if you lock throat, I'll cover that a bit more detail later. So basically to achieve this diminishing scale, you want to select a more distant background. This one's really cool atmospheric perspective. These basically you can change. It's also known as aerial perspective. So this is where the distant background, because it has more air to travel through or it has more molecules and particles to get through. So it could be snow, can be fog, can even be late afternoon die when you get really strong sunlight. And it explains why mountains in the distance have a low contrast and look lighter as well. Depending any MAC just choose, I want to have that mountain range look even further away. So all choose to come back later in the afternoon to get that composition, to have that atmospheric perspective. That's kind of why it's in a compositional course. Foc photos, really like this one here. It's only really interesting this one here because I'm in focus, I'm outside and on the factor for the following. If I was standing in fog, that was just as low contrast, that would be nowhere near as interesting because there is no juxtaposition or contrast of me with my vibrant colors on the glove thing against the background. If you've always just this muted with colors and then it wouldn't be anywhere. It's interesting is made popping out against that background there. We talked about this one before for specific div, it's also an N as distance to camera perspective distortion. So this is a scenario you're probably familiar with. You've seen these getting around on Instagram and that sort of thing. That looks like cool. There are a lot of fun. In my forte. Diaphoretic creativity challenges wanted things like kitchen that they're playing with because it's just a lot of font. If you can't create this, then in locked down and you can't get out and play around with things that are more distant. You can use a double exposure app like our handy photo by AD MFA soft. It's available on Google Play and that's the, you can actually 4. Step 2 - Position the Subject - 20 Tips: Welcome back to step number two. Step number one was fantastic. We covered how to position yourself and your smartphone camera by changing the height, moving in and out, stepping backwards and forwards, rotating the camera, tilting it, getting all sorts of different positions with yourself and the camera had to prepare your camera. Lens choice. Camera mode. We've talked about lots of things in there. So step number two, this one is all about positioning the subject in the frame. Now not every photo has a subject or what I'll talk about shortly, a visual anchor. It could just be something that he's the main emphasis, the thing that you want the viewer to notice first when they're looking at your photo, you'll notice that again, they might be some crossover with some of these techniques that I talked about. And that's okay, like filling, fill the frame is one. So there could be headed position yourself, so getting close. And it could also be something that you crop later on in step number four, in isolation is another example where changing the smartphone angle will isolate the person against the background or changing different background elements for that contrast and make them stand at and isolate that way. So you'll notice that we're not talking about some of these compositional techniques that they do. This a little bit of crossover. But when I do crossover, there's a reason for it and the reason why they're in each of these separate toolboxes, if you'd like. Now, step number two is intended to help you thinking more about when you need to make those small little adjustments to your position, but more importantly, way to position that main subject in the frame. The obvious most transformational tip that I could say straightaway, he's just having them off since that's just purely doing that. And what that does is that your attention, we'll go straight to that subject off-center and leave plenty of space. And we can talk about Spice a little bit in this step. But firstly, let's just touch on how your eye works at the retina, at the back of the eye has photoreceptive cells that process to the world around us and they densely packed in this center area is small area called the fovea. This is the center of our vision. And when it's where we have the most highest resolution in the nephron as ER visit. And d tau is progressively, progressively decrease that as we move further away from the center of our vision. And that's what we call peripheral vision. A quick exercise. You go dance, scroll down and look at the text down below this video, you'll see quick little exercise they were having NX and I'll get you to just focus on that X. And then while you're still staring at that X on the screen, just notice how everything around it is out of focus. So in this exercise with the x down there, I'll get you to stare at it and then try without moving your eyes, try and read the text above it and below it. It's actually really hard because of that peripheral vision, how you just lose all resolution OF from the center. And that's why it's so important. That's what I'm talking about. This is that In your position, the main subject. Now, if you want to live more about this lookup visual scanning on Google, and it's really, it's really fascinating. Kicked out when I was learning all about composition because it's called, you have that fixation and then it's called foliation within your scan. And you have little micro movements here if the log scrapers second way your scanned the image, it's important to Plessy our main subject in an area that then allows us to move around. I think, of rambled enough day. Let's get straight into the first one, visual anchor. Now, not every photo I mentioned makes the have a subject or visual anchor, but certainly it helps to create that stronger firearm. Typically, you want to have one main element, subject or focal point that initially attracts your viewers attention. And sit at the table their eye on any gauges that it can be a single point, it could be a foreground interests that gesture a single color. In this example here it's the rope. When I walk past the same with the boat here, the rope caught my attention when I squeaked it and it's squinting is a great way to pick up on contrast. In a saint looked at the lights and darks and that sort of thing. The rope just screamed at me. Take a photo of me. He said that was the intention with this photo. Now I have made it center front and center so that you become fixated on it, your attention Good stretch. And then step four, I explained to you later on how to really make that rope stand out and use some of those compositional tools we're editing tools to enhance that viewer experience. Next is emphasis and dominance. Like I said, it doesn't have to have a main subject. But here you can see it's a black and white photo that I've got heat, but the first photo, the color, it was all murky, yucky. Quite descriptive. Isn't that murky and yucky? But the rocks had this really awful colors to it and wasn't a very pleasant photo. But then converting it to a monochromatic photo, I was able to take the attention away from those colors and put it back on the waterfall. Each they're similar to visual anchor mentioned before, emphasis and dominance is a technique the places greater visual white on a particular area. What causes that extra is strengthened visual weight could be the color, the shape, size, leading lines, that sort of thing, that kind of forces you to. Notice a particular part of the photo first. Depending on the genre that you're photographing, a few photographing grip of people. And they were all looking in one way and one person is looking towards the camera. There you going to stand at the face will stand at somebody's standing a bit closer them is larger in the frame or dominance. They got to stand up. Yeah, we can create more emphasis through those sort of techniques. Now touched on this at the very start, this is one of my favorite most transformational techniques. I guess it's one of the ones that we all learned first when we started looking at composition. So it could be Rule of Thirds, that sort of thing. I'll touch on the light a bit, but off-center, basically placing your main subject of center near this photo that I have here, if the helmet that's in the center, but the squirrel, this is not real. This was two photos. This square root is actually poking its head out of a being at the front of the cats. Also. Just add a bit of fun with the double exposure to put them together. Glenn at the tones made them look like similar lighting, that sort of thing. But you can see there he's he's heard the eye is off-center, so you're you're drawn to that eye contact first and then you'd move in Headspace thinner around it to explore the rest of it because of the shape of the helmet, he kind of see the eye and for me I follow the outline of the helmet and then you pick up on the textures and the details. And that brings me back because the background is blurred, narrowed, or one of the most popular compositional rules, if you like the rule of thirds. It's so widely accepted, recognize there is quite a strong compositional techniques that even your phone has this built-in. It's called grids or grid lines, depending on what smartphone you have. A way of encouraging you to position your main subject off-center, like I've talked about. But having the two vertical lines and two horizontal lines, what you want to try and do if you have a horizon, you want to try and have that horizon on one of those two horizontal lines. Now, if you can imagine you place it along the bottom horizon, then 1 third is the foreground, and then the two-thirds at the top is the sky. So if you've got an amazing sunset, beautiful colors, that's where you would put the horizon. But if this guy is just so, so then you would have just 1 third of the sky and have that arise in on that top horizontal line. In addition to that, if you have a focal point that you really want to have that focal point or one of those four intersecting lives. There's four points in here in this example with these duck. It's, I is smack bang on that intersecting line there. Great place to see this kind of compositional rule taken place all the time in movies or TV shows. You'll see people standing off to the sides that you can get the contextual background behind. And note that do this yourself when you go on holidays and he's seconds selfie, if your cell phone location, you will instinctively move off to the side to allow the person who is sitting over your shoulder and where you are. This is an example of compositional techniques that just becoming instinctively that even really makes it think about it. But again, come back to these resource and look up these different compositional tools and techniques. Next one is a bit of a variation of the rule of thirds. This fund is 1 third, two-thirds. So basically allow one of those vertical or horizontal logic. Basically once your main visual anchor we made focal point to feel along one of those lines, but occupy and take up the space of two sections. Definitely need to look at the visual heat. Understand what I'm saying. But here I have a mushroom and the mastery is on that vertical line and it takes up two-thirds of that vertical line. What that does is that places that off center, but also has some visual whites because of the space that it occupies. So you can see he, this is where we started to stack compositional techniques and it works really well to that extra dominance and make it really clear what that subject these and incorporate that spice around it. Next one, I'm gonna get technical and kcat, I'm getting a bit. It's called the fight, agreed? Now, it's a variation of the rule of thirds is very similar to the rule of thirds, so I should say. And it also expands on Golden Ratio, don't cover shortly. It's based on the Fibonacci sequence. Now in the text below, I've written the length of the line of X plus Y. First segment is x. The second segment is what? The equation is, except for y equals in brackets, X plus Y bracket divided by x equals 1.610. Both love, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's also known as the golden ratio or divide proportion. And Pi. A cut through all that mumbo jumbo technical stuff. We compare it to the rule of thirds that divides the frame into three rows. Three columns equals sign. So one by one by one, the grid makes the middle row and column smaller to accommodate that golden ratio, resulting in 1.6 by one. We got through that one a bit technical. 100% understand it. But what are to understand is that the intersecting lines is actually closer to the center. Now for me, if you're shooting in a sixth 89, then you can apply this. But if you are surely a square crop, so your intention is for it to be a one-by-one aspect ratio. This is not gonna work because that intersecting line, he's gonna be almost smack bang in the middle of the frame, which is totally impractical because then you might as well just call it centered. For a square crop, the pipe rate is not good. I always recommend to try and have that focal point closer to the age. So it's more of censoring is still leaves that room around it, left to rot a touched on this before. It's a compositional technique based on the viewer reading a photo like a book. That's our visual literacy is. It's basically explaining and understanding how people read visuals and creating a photo with balance, visual harmony, and basically aesthetically pleasing photo. You want to make it really obvious to the viewer what it is that they're interpreting. That's one of the reasons why we simplify saying we take away distractions and that sort of thing. We wanted to take that mental load off them and make a really quick and simple for them to read from left to right. If that's, if that's the way someone naturally read something their networks perfectly for them. If, like I mentioned before, if they have a background in newspaper, in advertising, I will probably still have. It will go to the most expensive part of the frame which is up the top left, go diagonal down to the bottom and the backup their right side. If you read with your background and culture, you might retakes go from right-to-left. Might not work for you. In the army. They teach people to look at a scene and scan is ST from right to left and get rid of that, what they call closure and where your mind fills in the blanks and makes assumptions about what's in front of them. So they're taking a lot more detail when they forced themselves to go against the normal, natural process of reading. That's it. This is another example of them just being personal preference. You might read from left to right, but then when you look at that bottom photo, he actually liked that one better. Instead of following the leading lines at the boardwalk to the sunset. To sunset might pick up your eye, go along the boardwalk and then bringing it back to the sunset again, It's still have the same visual journey just in the opposite direction. It's interesting in workshops when I use these photos in example, it's always 5050, which really surprised me, but it's still a compositional technique and it's one that just worth knowing. I think I've talked about off-center and rule of thirds and Pi grid and all that sort of thing. And I've tried to convince you to it, everything yet to the edges, but even putting a photo in the middle called centred some scenarios, it works perfectly and you wouldn't consider anything else. And perfectly symmetrical photos, it works really well to have it centered like this example he, another example of where centered technique might work really well is a plate of food on a table. An overhead shot rule of thirds doesn't really work, especially if you don't have other props around it, to have it centered because that's what you want people to see. You don't want that. I wondering this amazing example of where somebody says, I learned the rules and then break them. Well, if you break the rules, rule of thirds, you might end up with centered. If you learn about this sort of scenario here. And looking down through here, centered, if I move off to the side and govern a different perspective, or that just becomes a different type of compositional techniques that you applaud that he, in this scenario, this just work perfect because it invites you to think about yourself standing there and taking in that view and being balanced. It's the same with so much going on in this scene is actually simplified because we've gone that centered approach and it works well because the sides are darker. Lots of tones are all in the middle. So that helps emphasize that centered composition that we have a frame within a frame, also known as sub framings. This is where basically you look for a frame scene. It doesn't get any simpler than that. Now this is not framing where you look for contents and elements around the edges that drink. Bring your attention back into the photo. This is actually having, it looks like a picture frame in their windows are perfect example that say you can shoot your garden outside of your home. But if you introduce the frame of the window, then it just creates a vista for you to look through. The viewer can imagine themselves sitting there looking at that window, evokes that imagination if the view, and it's one of the things that we try and do with our photography. He's kind of involve the viewer in the story. So that works quite well. All right, we got to cover a few different space compositional techniques because it's so important. This is my first one I want to cover is negative space. So this is essentially the area around the main subject. Keeps. Paper will actually use the reference that allows the subject to breathe, keeps them space. If you have the edges To close to the main subject that he feels cramped and it can create visual tension that by leaving enough space around the main subject, unoccupied spaces even better with that distractions, it also helps to isolate the subject to make it stand out. Now to have a nice clean negative space, you can have a consistent color, flat surface like a wall or the sky. Basically, if you have a distraction free negative space, it creates com, pleasing, acidic. And you can imagine if you have lots of content going on around the main subject, it becomes really busy and overwhelming for the person to view it in the main. If ASIS of the dominance on that visual anchor can be lost because you're going all over the place looking at trying to understand what it is. But if you have that nice clean negative space, then it brings your attention back to the main focal point, opposite of negative spaces, positive spice. So this is the area that the subject occupies. That could be a person, an NMR building something in nature. It could be anything. It's basically catch the attention of the viewer. Whenever I looked, think about positive space and I'm thinking what is it about that, that makes that stand out? In this example. It's the textures and lines in his praying mantis that really, I want to emphasize and to really emphasize that are blurred the background and by juxtaposition of the smooth against the ruggedness of the textures in the praying mantis. The next one that I want to talk about is one that I get really excited about is active spice. Now, active spice, that's not positive, negative is basically it's room for the subject to move into. So if you have something in the photo that has movement and it's walking towards or running towards or silent towards a direction. Then having spice for it to move into It's kind of a heads the person, the viewer looking at a gang, I can say where they're going. On the contrary, if you have them about to run out of the same or walk out of the scene. You can see where the beam, but you can't see with a Gaussian. So it does create some visual tensions and mystery thinking. What are they going to run into? An imminent collision about the type of license that say, What's this? I can create a more engaging photo. My preference in most scenarios is basically to have that active space in front of and give them room to move into and make it really clear what the story is. Okay, now we're starting to get into a design element repetition and pattern. Repetition and patterns have been repeating or having something very similar popping up throughout the image and a credit as a theme, we feel like it can be slightly different in shape and size, but it could be the colors and in this example, the helmets, if you like, what days who these people are wearing in the March, then that creates that repetition. It doesn't matter whether they close further away, different heights in the image. That repetition is what makes it really stand out. I selection is a great one for storytelling because it makes the main visual anchor just kind of pop and stand out. This is one that it has a lot of crossover with other compositional techniques. It's about bullying the attention of the viewer and making a really healthy is high. This is what I want you to look at. Now there's lots of different ways you can do this. You can get on a low angle tilt. The cameras said that they're isolated against the sky is probably the easiest way. Isolation comes in many different forms. So touch on these slaves, the juxtaposition, so the contrast that can be something that's really detailed like that praying mantis that we looked at before. It gets the creamy background. That's isolation because it stains at and says that degree of separation from the background, if you like. And this is why portrait mode on your phone or live focus is so good with the official blurred background because it isolates the foreground interests the person. What if released that you'll capture the team focused against the blue background and separates it. In a nutshell, isolation East, separating the main subject or any other focal points from the background. Fill the frame. Filling the frame is basically get right in there. A perfect example is flowers are having a flare example. If you've got a really cluttered, distracting background that you can't avoid. You can't move around. Then getting really close gets him a, you can see the details and we've talked about this lens too. Subject distortion. So getting it nice and close, you can get some really cool proportions. You can change the lens on your phone. You can change it to a two types. You can go for an ultra wide and take advantage of the macro mode is so many different things. What a macro lens on the kids so close. It's, it's one of my favorite things to do and it's kind of moss Stahl is to get really close because I love seeing the unseen with macro photography. So filling the frame does that. Another example of filling the frame could be sports and getting that dissociate moment. And when you do that, you want to fill the frame because you want to make it really obvious that, that gesture, that interaction, whatever is happening. You can do this by just zooming in, moving in with your fate. Or in step four, when we talk about cropping in editing, he can really bring that subject to the forefront by filling the frame and cropping it nice and tight proportion while we're on the same if different design elements or portion, similar visual anchor emphasis, dominance using proportion is another way too. If it's not true, accurate proportion and it's exaggerated. And we covered this in step one using different lenses, then it'll, it'll attract the viewer's attention. Proportion is the size of the element relative to other elements in the whole frame. I'll touch on this later on. Here's another example of thesis style, where you have something with the viewer knows how big a person is. Losing a person in a landscape provides that scale. Proportions doesn't have to be accurate. That can just be abnormal to kind of engage. That also introduce a bit of visual tension and credit sense of whimsy, cool, and humerus. You can do whatever you want with proportions. I love playing around with proportions with double exposures like this one. What's older? Rotting a leafing the bird bath. It grabs your attention the kind of think, oh, what's going on here? I'm not quite sure this doesn't look real eye that looks real. And having a bit of humor to engage the viewer is lot of fun. You can use proportions to introduce visual tension as well. They have a lot of fun with proportions. Next, this silhouettes, I love silhouettes. They basically at backlit subject that creates a shadow, outline and removes or reduces the details and the subject itself. So it can, it can have a bit of mystery, bit of trauma can make a strong emotional connection because the view, it doesn't really know what's going on and makes assumptions with the outline and what they're getting closer in. And look at the rest of the photo for the context of trying to work it out. And those sort of photo is really powerful when the viewer has to take a moment to actually work out what's going on there. Myself. My style is to have D cluttered, distraction free, simple photos. I'm going to say simple. It's actually really hard. Photography. I've mentioned this is a subtractive arts. You want to try and take us see, remove all the elements that do not add to the context of a silhouette is a great way. I've just breaking the same Danny two basic forms and shapes. And I encourage you to have a real good play with that one. This one is fun, It's a little bit more to this one juxtaposition. So basically this is contrast. Now, what is contrast? The simplest way I've found to explain contrast is the difference between two things. So that is the difference in colors, tones, textures. It's the separation as well. We talked about that before. The most common understanding of way of thinking about juxtaposition. These one element that stands out against the background has this separation. Now, we'll talk about this later in the next step is color contrast, but it's a great way of creating that juxtaposition. And you can see an example here with the photo that sometimes it's difficult to, to see where their own eyes, whether there is a real color contrast. And then we can use the width sight color.adobe.com. And it's fantastic. You upload your photo and you're firing and you can see on the color wheel. But sometimes this example and all I did was I went to two Snapseed away two curves, dragged the pin in the bottom-left corner to the top left corner. And then on the opposite end, the top-right pink drag that down and that basically inverted the colors. And when you invert the colors, you can see here with these two examples. One, it's not so much contrast there, but then when you look at the one on the right, it's, what's a boom, wow, that's a real contrast. And that's checks the position where it really jumps off. It separates from the background. Now touched on contrasts bank color, shape can also be alignment, direction, tone, texture, height, size, that proportion we discussed just recently. Yeah, it's just making it stand out from everything else is a great juxtaposition. Now another form of juxtaposition, East time or objects. Now, what am I talking about this? Because what I was just talking about before we juxtaposition changes that hierarchy of elements that is seen in the photo. So you can understand why you would want to have something contrasted boy, but with time and objects, what I'm talking about there is having two main elements in the photo and creating that story with composition alone at the time, what are you trying to do is create a story and change the way the viewer looks at it and guide them through the photo. And the great example is having something old and something new. It could be an old person indirectly with the young person or a new building erected amongst them, alt buildings that juxtaposition between the two. That's what I love. It could also be the juxtaposition of materials used in the buildings, from glass to stone, that sort of thing. So that juxtaposition is where it stands out. Last one is step number two is I contact now? I didn't want to in here, I didn't want to put different posing techniques and lifting people's shoulders up and positioning of forums and where you're pointing and all that sort of thing. But I did want to include eye contact because eye contact is not just limited to people that also animals. You can see here the two photos of the B11 back to us. And the other one you can see the that, and you can see the eye and you can see that lie a bit of light in the eye. And having that i, it creates a bit of a connection. Having that or that face looking at us, it's like a survival instinct thing. We look at the eye and we read the I a, I a threat to friendly. You can write the expression and the attention that phrase to the expression in the eyes. The eyes who say so much in hepatocytes, the guy wire to the soul, isn't it? I don't know about you. I mean, it's personal preference again and what we liked, but I think that photo of the bay on the left looks much better purely because of that, ISO, again, have applied with the experiment. All of these compositional techniques are talking about here. Just the ideas. There's no right and wrong. Just want you to be aware of them and have a play around with them. Again, do not want you to be paralyzed by all these ideas. This is just a toolbox. We jump in the tools. So if you are taking a fight of a flower and you've positioned yourself step number one, step number two. Now I'm thinking I want to fill the frame. What is the main visual anchor here? What's the dominant color in place this time and off center? I want to incorporate the rule of thirds. Do I want to have the rule of odds? I'll talk about it and the next one. But it's what we want to have, the rule of thirds, but then have 1 third, two-thirds including that. Is it a square crop? Is that a horizontal portrait crop? Do I need to bring in the pie grid? Do I want to have things angled so that people would look at this photo of the flower from left to right too. I just want to have it perfectly symmetrical like a daisy. Daisy just looks fantastic with the middle centered in the frame. If I take a step back and I want to incorporate more of the flower with the steam. Do I want to have some negative space around that or do I wanted to take and fill the frame? Because the intention of the photo is to capture that incredible details in the flower. Taking a step back and might be a mess planting if this same flowers. So I can get that repetition and pattern through the photo. They might be one flower that's different color to the rest of them to create that isolation, getting down on a low angle or might be able to isolate one flair amongst the rest of them against the sky, have backlighting, have isolation. He could see how many of these different techniques that can be applied just to the one scenario of a flower. We're gonna get right into that as well in the next step. So I look forward to seeing you there in step number three. Thanks again for joining me. 5. Step 3 - Position the Supporting Elements - 34 Tips: Welcome back. Step number three, this is exciting. This is way composited. Traditional understanding of composition is where you place the main subject and other supporting elements and how they all interact with each other. So that's what going to get into in this step, which is you've got your angle, you've got your subject narrower char, work out where everything else fits into the narrative of what you're trying to communicate, the intention of the photo. What adds to it, what doesn't add to it that you can take it. We're gonna get right into all that. We're gonna get into some principles of design because that's what we're doing now. We've worked at storage and they were designing the story. We're designing the bits that we want to include. And then understanding how we visually interpret things going on around the same. So that's really exciting. This is where we break the same down into separate elements. And the placement of those elements is how they interact with the subject. So firstly, we are going to get into the Gestalt theory, which is German for shape from the 1920s, was the scene in photo composition course. Well, it's because understanding how our eye moves around between different things, how our brain fills in the blanks and Microsoft stuff is really, it's really quite fascinating. So we're gonna cover a couple of those. A quick example is where something guys saying you have a scene ends in something and then it goes out of the scene and it comes, it comes back into the same app brain, fills in the blank there and troubles at sort of the frame. Or another example is the outline of a shock. Even though they can't see the details of the shock, we know it's a shock. So that's the sort of thing that we're going to talk about, that what are elements? I've used that term quite a bit in LSA. Elements that contextual items in the frame that provide context to location, time of day, activity, even the mood in the photo. So it's the narrative that we're going to be focusing on. Elements is more than just simply stuff in the photo. We're adding this taken that it's more than that. It's also gesture. Use the example of people standing on the corner and looking up that interaction with their environment and the gesture of everybody looking at the facial expressions, that sort of thing. You can't help but look up and see what they're looking at. So that's the sort of thing. Positioning creates balance as well. So we're gonna talk about that is if you have small group, but they clearly a group, then that becomes an element. Or if you have an individual little audit I wrote oscillator itself. That creates imbalanced because you've got a small thing with a large thing, but there's ways around it using spice and that sort of thing. So that's something I'm gonna throw out the visual white. It refers to the amount of impact or false that the element has in the same and determines where you will be attracted to. And I will go to. That can be factors like color, shape, size, and other visual measurements like contrasts, that sort of thing that attracts the attention of the viewer. I think I've rambled on a bit there already. So I think we'll get strategy to the individual elements and components of a photo and break it down. And I can't remember. You didn't have to have all these. Just be aware of when you're sitting up the photo and you've you've worked at what the intention is, what the stories while you're taking the photo, you've got the right angle, distance, holding the farther right way. Now we're looking at the main subject and looking at what's around it and got an account might need to move to slightly, or it might need to just move that out of the way. Let's get started. Quick closure is the first one. I've kind of touched on clothes. You're already where something exits the Friday and it comes back into the frame, upright fills in the gap and guys okay. That's the same thing that's gone out and continuing to come back in again. Now, we've talked about the fovea, the central part of your vision that gives you the highest resolution. When we moved outside of that, we have peripheral vision. Our eyes and our brains work together to see the details that are there and then make up gaps. That's why I talked about earlier, left to right. And in the army they teach people to scan against the natural direction that they read. So if you read from left to right, scan is saved from right to left because that forces you to taking the details of what's there and your brain can't then take over and try to fill in the gaps and miss important details. The fuel will be more engaged if they have enough visual cues in the photo to apply their learning experiences to the visual narrative. We talked about this earlier with the third-person perspective and over the shoulder photo because then they can kind of fill in the gaps and use their imagination and bring their own experiences, what it would be locked to be there because they're kind of be encouraged to do that. An example of photos with folk or dark shadows or other areas where it doesn't have complete details of what it is. Correct, that mystery, that kind of what is a force you to ask questions? It even subconsciously you go, what is there? I'm not sure. I want to know what's there. And then he encourages you to take more time to analyze the photo, to understand the photo. Take this example of photo. The puddle gives that tastes of mystery with covering parts of the scene, it gives you the view of the opportunity to fill in that visual gap. Complaint and close the photo of themselves. That's what closure comes from. So keeping a viewer engaged for longer increases your chances of getting that intention across to them as well. With this photo by having just a majority of the photo, the reflection, you can see that it's a billboard, but it's cut out at the top. So it just adds a little bit of creativity and a unique perspective to the scene. All right, I figured to ground. So this provides context. So when you're looking at a photo, we instinctively simplify the same that's in front of us and we're trying to identify the primary subject with the figure and then the ground in this scenario figure grant, the grant is the background. Background doesn't always need to be a background. It's just the contrast part of the photo behind the subject. A lot of people's will argue that there's no such thing as a background, because the background is just contextual elements thrown into the photo. That's another discussion for another day. It basically, the figure here is the marshmallows in this example on the stick, the ground and that provides the background, that provides the context is the fireplace there, and you could say that it's in the gardens, the foliage and that sort of things have figured the grant is that relationship between the two. And that background supports the context of the marshmallows there. You could say there is a distinct relationship between the two, where it becomes unstable and difficult is where you have a scene where there's no clear made subject and it's all just elements, It's all background. Having figured a grand that relationship makes them stand out and makes it easier for the viewer to interpret your photo and that attention of the firearm now generally, objects or, or areas that are larger in focus, higher contrast, more vivid colors, faces. In another example, I talked about all this in the introduction and oscillation that creates the separation between the background. We've talked about that a little bit. Next one, proximity, unity and abundance. So the idea here is that how close or far apart objects are in the image. By putting them all together, we're creating unity here in this example, all those rocks creates unity and it's just closely linked with positive and negative space, as it will create one positive space area contained and you have all that negative space around it. And we've talked about the benefits of that before. Imbalance, imbalance in the photo for having them altogether they list randomized and provides that unity. And another example is a garden bed where you might have a mess planting of a certain flower taught and have a large kind of drift of flowers through there that creates abundance. Because that's an emphasis that big creates unity and that proximity of all those flowers together creates a strong visual element similar to proximity. Common fight is where you have similar objects, items in the same that all heading in the same direction that makes them appear as one coherent group. Now, it doesn't matter where they're positioned in the photos. Some could be up a little bit higher and isolated, but they still have that common fight of all heading in the same direction. So there is one group. How do we apply this? Practically? Patients sometimes waiting for a group of animals, they're all hidden in one direction is difficult. Fading time is always a really good one because they're all heading in the same. They all have a common fight. They're all heading to the trough where they're gonna get fresh food. That said having one ad on their own or in this example, having to pledge shaping, there are three black shape. I think that's a shame, not a dog here through three black shape. That creates a little bit of visual interest in sort these common fight. So we have a clay story of what's going on and having that oscillation of those can make them stand out. There's no right and wrong way of doing this. A way of making a more balanced and aesthetically pleasing fighter by applying this sort of design principle, another design principle. And again, this is called the law of continuous. There's not lost, There's no right and wrong. It's just understanding how our eye works and how these design principles and tried and tested for what since the 1920s, a long time, these ones. And it's just a way of understanding why this photo works. For me. This photo works. So this is continuous. It's where you have a path or some sort of visual guide that leads you somewhere. You can't quite see the destination, but you're filling the blanks and you go, I know that this path is going to the apex at the top there and it's going to go down. And then, I mean this example here we do have a focal point at the end of it. But continuous ease knowing that the breach continues over this, it doesn't always have to have a focal point at the end, but not saying the actual edge of the bridge or the end of the breach. We we know that it's there. This is not limited to just pat, roads or rivers. This is just as relevant to the alignment of different sequences of elements in the scene. Patterns, lines, shapes, or any other grouping their eye tends to follow up. And she explains wife who I leading lines are so powerful in a photo if we instinctively follow them to the end. And this is where this part of the step-by-step processes is exciting for him because now we're creating hierarchy. Within that hierarchy, wary of focal points and what grabs our attention about Krebs at next. And then we have controlled using these things like continuance, leading lines to kind of manipulate the attention and the sequence in the order and sequence that people who read our Alpha. So once you get to that point, it's kind of, it's really exciting and understanding things like the viewer applying their own experiences. Filling in the blanks with these kind of design contexts is where you really start to take it to the next level. Similarity, this one is interesting. This don't lower similarities suggest that at brines. Group items together and within the photo, first of all, we might group the main visual elements, the emphasis that dominant parts of the scene and they will go group than net credits. We understand what this main subject is, what the photos about, and then we'll go and group other similar items and create, kind of break it down into the simplest form first of all, and then we use these other techniques that we're talking about with the elements and positioning things to then kind of encourage them to analyze and break things down even more by including shadows and things that kind of what's there and creating that mystery. Evoking their emotions and using their experiences to try and interpret those visual clues. Accuse. First of all, similarity is basically their initial brightened down the same into real basic sections of the photos that aren't necessarily it needs to even be in the same proximity we talked about in the same location. They can be throughout the whole scene, something that is common. That this is where it's a little bit different, common fight, everything, a common endpoint or destination similarity. It just makes it, they've all got something similar and that kind of creates a grouping as well. In a nutshell, it means that similarity explores the brain's tendency to try and identify matching features and quickly tries to identify their meetings in a composition. That means that we're trying to, what we're trying to do is help the viewer making those connections. Minimalism is a really good one. Now we're starting to move out of the distal theory, going to other principles of design. Minimalism is one that I've talked about, a favorite because photography is a subtractive art, which means for an artist starting with a blank canvas, they started with nothing and then the adding, they'd layering, they're making it more complex and can add to it with photography unless you're in a studio setup, we're out there in the environment and we're taking a photo and then we need to try and subtract parts. We did that in a composition with minimalism. We try and find somebody with different backgrounds. We can blur or use all these sorts of techniques. And there's all different ways we can do that. Architecture is a fantastic way where we might want to just concentrate on just the corner of the building against the sky and we want to minimize. So that's a great way of exploring more abstract photography. And once you start to view the world around you and more abstract and, and look at it based on just shapes, lines, that sort of thing. It starts to get really exciting. A great way to play around with minimalism with some of your existing photos is to convert to a black and white and they turn into a high contrast black and white. Now, inside Snapseed, there's actually a filter or a look style wherever it's cold depending on what device you have. And I can rename it, and it's black and white. It's a high contrast. So basically, they take all the tonal range of the whole photo where you've got your shadows, your highlights, and you've got your midpoints. The midpoints will actually stretch those and make them either a highlight or a shadow. That you have more extremes in the photos, that you have more whites and blacks. That's a great way of mineralizing what's in the photo. And yeah, it's just a fun exercise, sorry character haven't got that one. Schuyler is a really interesting one, adds the visual cue to emphasize the size of the environment. Or you can use style to use that element as the main subject as well. The example of this AC in the rainforest where you've got people walking through the rainforest that just shows how just had told those trees are. And if you have people walking through a rainforest is a really good color for jackets. Both my boys all get them wear jackets. They didn't get a choice that we bought them for that visual element and the human element in the photos, I think it works really well. Adding elements like that, we all know help human needs. So that's why adding human element in landscape photography works so well. Just be mindful though that's the subject to lens distortion that we experienced with things that are further away look smaller. So when you add a human element in a distance and might not be the right proportions. So after I use these handy photo and it's testing, you could just select the person, you can resize them and they block back on the scene again. But you want to try and use that creatively or in a way that's authentic to the actual scene that's in front of you and the intention of your photo. So that's sort of adjustments are still gonna be authentic, perfectly aligned with what you're trying to achieve with the photo. Some saints might be really grand and you've taken those photos for your size. The photo doesn't do it justice. This is, this is one of those examples where it just looks so great, a big, amazing in front of you. But then when you look on a two-dimensional photo just looks flat. Adding a, something that provides style also create some depth to the photo, makes it look a bit more three-dimensional. All right, leading lines. So I'm going to go through a few different ideas here with lines. The first one here is leading lives. Now, As you know, I, I went when I was researching all the content for this, I went through different. Genres or went through different areas at side of photography. So garden design was one of them and what we referred to as a leading line in photography composition in gardening, they call that a regulating line. So the idea of these leading lines and regulating lines is that it encourages you move from the visual anchor, the emphasis that dominance the main part of the photo. And it encourages your eye to follow that and guide to another point. In gardening, the really minimize how many leading lines, because you want to start off with the main structure of the garden and then you'll add in other visual elements with your plant choices, layering of heights and all that sort of thing. So they didn't have too many leading lines in photography. In L's, we can have as many leading lots as we want. We can have it so that really what you want to try and do is you want to try and have them. We kind of move around, not just old leading lines leading to the 1. That might be great way to simplify the thyroid have simplification in the photo. But then when they get to that point, there's nothing bringing them back against the stuff. Then I got got it. And I'll move on to the next photo. That's leading lines such as edges of structures, objects, physical line. So it could be gotten bid, talk about are the ages of books in this scenario a fantastic to lead you through different elements in the frame where these work really well is where they intersect with the subject or elements in the frame that you want them to pick up through the visual journey. The next one I want to cover is diagonal lines. There's two different types days, from bottom-right to top-left corner since the line and in his bottom-left to top-right corner, Barak line. I have no lines are more dynamic than just a vertical line or a horizontal line. There's actually more distance along that line. It actually takes you through the photo instead of just going upwards or across, kind of leech you through the photo a little bit more pink. Imagine walking out of your front door. It kind of look from the bottom because you don't want to skip over package that's lifted. So you scan from the bottom up and if you read from left to raga covered this earlier in the last step, then you'll scan from left to right. So that's why it's kind of naturally flows that way. From the baroque diagonal from bottom-left to top-right. It's just a natural way for us to scan something. The other way creates visual tension. And you can see here with the big for me, I personally that creates a bit of visual attention. What I pick up on first in the photo is different. On the left example that I do on the writing sample. With the left, I say the base ice first and then I follow the base. Whereas in the other example where they with the Baroque diagonal, I say the bright colors of the flower first because that's on the left side, on the bottom. So it's just each thing there's no right and wrong. It's just a way to help you design your photo and just experiment. And that's what this is all about. It's just experimenting. The next line I want to cover here is the expressive lines. So this is an s-curve or a zip code. I could have listed these separately. And if anyone's gonna divide monkey didn't cover exactly a 100 things. One of those people that meet peak and go, I didn't get value because I only got 99 because you've duplicated. Well, this one, we could split into two if we need to. This side, this is the same principle and that's what this is all about. That transformation for you and understanding. It uses all these sort of lines, an expressive line, whether it's an S-shape or residual, both the same and encourages your viewer to traverse through the photo a little bit longer. So similar to a diagonal, takes longer to move your eye through there, then it's asked for a vertical or horizontal. This one is much more dynamic. It leads you back and forth. And I touched on before about bringing the viewer back to the, back to the start if you can, with an escape or a Zipcar if he doesn't necessarily need to because you've already engaged with for an extra amount of time, sir. It's a way of swerving them through left and right and taking more time to take it in this sort of S-curves and zip codes. These ones are the ones that really benefit from having a visual anchor or some sort of focal point at the end of it to make that journey worthwhile. Because if I say this all the time with river photos and at the end of the river It's just nothing. It's like okay, well, what else is going on in this photo? So having a bit of a reward for their, for their visual journey seems to just a little bit more stronger composition hit storytelling. Now, it sounds like that I'm against horizontal and vertical lines. The horizontal line is fantastic because he can say, and he's saying he, it actually creates depth. It took me a while to understand these because all my photos when I first started where say Skype's and landscapes, in most cases I just had the one horizontal line and that was the Horizon which was right down the distance. I might have a foreground interests. And that chronic creates another visual reference to depths. But when you can introduce it like a saint like this, where you've got several horizontal lines that just becomes so much more powerful to make that look more three-dimensional. And women, again, to step forward, we start to brighten a darkened areas, then that's what you can create even more depth. These horizontal lines are just a really strong way, especially if you intersect them with visual elements to break it up, then. It doesn't become static and boring when you, when you use this concept with others. The next one that also creates stability is vertical lines. Horizontal provides stability, especially with a horizon that if it's not straight and it's crooked and McConaughey, something wrong with these photos subconsciously. So it's quite a bit by making it did strike creates that stability, vertical lines as well. And if you've have buildings that are not quite vertical, then look odd. It will look like It's very taken on a smartphone. You see that in real estate websites, you'll see the professional photographers have gone out there for properties that are for sale and they'll all have straight walls and then you'll see your property. Properties that are for rates where the rental manager has taken photos on a smartphone? Not understood how what causes that to prospective issues that we talked about earlier? There's vertical lines. If they striked in, it just provides stability to the photo maximum look stronger and more natural. Another great use of vertical, as you can see in this photo, is by having them, the distance reducing height, and that creates that visual perception of depth really effectively. The next one I want to cover here is an implied line of sight, black lines since it's aligning the photo that's not actually there. Great example of this is where you have people in the photos and people are looking at a particular way, could be animals and looking at particular way. What happens is we pick up on that face or that gesture and we will follow that. And especially when they spicy between them, we talked about this with active space earlier. Having spicy ahead of that person or animal or object that's facing a particular way. We will actually encourage you to follow that trajectory of way they're looking and pickup. Other visual elements in the photo could also be a vehicle. It could be a vehicle pointing a particular way. Could be a tray with a branch that's kind of extended and pointing in a particular direction, the 70 different implied line of sites that you can apply the photo it did I think need to design it. You can just see it in the foreign guy. That works really well. And then when you get to step forward and we start to really enhance the viewing experience, we can highlight that. So that's something that we kind of picked up on after the fact. This is one of my favorites and something that when you're a beginner photographer, you just have to find some train lines and railway lines and experiment with the converging lines. So it leads to a vanishing point or a diminishing point where you have those two parallels that converge towards each other. It doesn't have to be railway lines. It could be a straight or erode. And you can see the edges of the road chronic converge. It's called single-point linear perspective. There's so many different terms. There's also vanishing point, diminishing point converging lines, point of convergence, single-point linear perspective. That said this, so many different ways of describing this, but we've all experienced this, we've all seen it. And it does work very, very effective to create that depth in the photo and lead our imagination and lead us into the file. And that's what you want is to try and engage the viewer in your photo. But the basically gradient you need for this to work is two parallel lines and some distance. You can replicate this in getting up closer to his subject Lakoff photography, getting a type of photo of the corner dane, the side of the car will get smaller and smaller towards the back. But these are much more effective if you have parallel, actual, real distinctive parallel lines and distance that you shooting towards, moving beyond the lines. I think we did idle nine different lines, triangles. So it still has some lines in there and a kind of works the same way. So having triangles existing in the photos that I'm not talking actual triangle triangles. We don't necessarily need to geometry shapes in there. But it's the arrangement and it's the visual white and dominance of one part making the bottom of the triangle. And then this side is pointing up to a peak that could create a triangle. So it is, it is an implied shape if that makes sense. So basically it's two lines, the outline of a shape or grouping I talked about before bed grouping things together. The way you position the triangle shape can have a different field to the photo as well. And that's something that a lot of us struggle with. Someone says I at the photo feels unstable. It has visual white or it feels Something's not quite right about it or, and sometimes that's what we want. We want that visual attention in the photo. When you have a shape of something and it's a triangle and you have the base down the bottom and it's pointing up, that feels really stable. But when you have triangles that are upside down or inverted, then that's where he starts to do the visual tension. You can have any, say in this example here you can have triangles that are late to something off to the side. So it's a bit more dynamic. So you can see the difference there. A triangle that is pointing upwards is stable. A triangle that is pointing to the side is big dynamic. And then when you have one inverted, That's when he stinks, starts to look like they're going a full life. And bringing that visual. And the visual attention, we're gonna get a little bit technical here. I'm not gonna go too much into this because it's not really relevant. You just need to understand the practicality of applying it, not how it works, but it's the golden ratio or golden spiral. So before we get into the spiral, when it's kinda cover the ratio first. And it's, It's a proportion value considered by many to be pleasing and harmonious to the eye. Let's get into the golden ratio. So it exists between two quantities if their ratio is equal to the ratio of the sum to the logic quantity between the two. That sounds so complicated, doesn't it? Now, do I have a little diagram here? So the ratio of the length of the longer part, psi, that's to the length of the short part. So that's b is equal to the ratio of them combined together to create the longer length. A great example of this is a rectangle. And using that ratio, golden ratio proportion, silica sick, you don't need to worry about that. You never need to know about that every game. The goal here is just to make you aware of it. And if someone talks about the golden ratio, you can just go, that's about proportions. That's basically one of these. And saying everywhere from pyramids to Leonardo da Vinci referred to this as the divided proportion is another way that's referred to as viewers will naturally drawn to things that are in balance and in harmony. And we covered this in more detail later. This is a composition that offers that harmony. So we use an example here of the rectangle. So we split this up into a square and the leftover of the rectangle then becomes the new rectangle. And then we use those same proportions. And he can say he, that they end up being the same proportions each time because we're using that 1.61. You can say here the result is almost complete partitioning of the rectangle into squares. And then if you draw acts from the opposite corners of h-squared, he end up with a curve resembling the shape of a spiral. And that flows through the frame and leisure eye around the picture until it settles in the middle. Now, for me for so long, I didn't get it and I was just placing things right smack bang in that in that where it finishes. In the sense they also applying is similar to the intersecting points in a rule of thirds where you have it split out with two vertical to horizontal and then you got four into 60 points. I was using it that way anymore of how for that anything else and I didn't quite get it. And I say people using, this is another way of positioning the main focal point or the visual anchor. To make this really work along that way, didn't you place parts along the outside of the frame that follow that initial arc and the initial curve. That's when your eye moves around and follows that curve and then settles. I think that's what's missing when most people talk about the golden spiral is that they just settle on that main endpoint. Let me say it on the whole packing of the whole curve. So positioning and you see here with the squirrel, I've got the stop point. I've got the rock in one of the foot and then I've got another rock on the frame and then I've got the tile. So you can see there I've got 1234 different areas. They were we're a followed the initial curve around the frame and then I'll come back and sit alone on his face and neck. That endpoint. And the other example he with with the storm trooper holding the EPA is to clean the Heinz. Following again would follow that curve. And it's, I haven't got visual anchors or focal points all along the frame like this squirrel. But it follows that initial outline of the lens and moves around and say, it's probably less effective because they are still applied at a little bit there. Okay, moving on to the Fibonacci spiral. This is similar to the golden spiral, but instead of using the golden ratio, we're using another mathematical sequence. And this is called the Fibonacci sequence. It's a sequence where you go and add the two previous numbers to the next one. So we go from 011 plus one is 22, plus one is 33, plus two is 55 plus three heads. You get the picture. It's a sequence where you're adding to it. By dividing up the frame using that sequence, we then end up with assignment kind of curve, but it's slightly different proportions in different endpoints. So that's where the golden spiral and the Fibonacci spot differ. Basically once using the golden ratio and once using the Fibonacci sequence, the proportions and the lives that, OK, and all that sort of thing. I just slightly different. Barack diagonal is the next one. So this is a golden diagonal. It's also referred to, it's another compositional technique with diagonal lines. This one here we have basically one diagonal line which the main visual journey. And remembering in gardening they call that a regulating launch of the main journey. The main line in the photo is diagonal. Then we have from the two other corners, basically 45 degrees strike back in the Southern can't quite match up. So you have two diagonal lines. One is the diagonal and the other 245 degrees strep back in towards that. And it's a white of its route dynamic way of setting things up. So you've got the main visual journey and then he got two things. Two areas that conduct connect and looking at this photo, you can say that a, this facade of the photo, we've actually created two triangle shapes. And these two triangles shapes late to the center but not quite there offset and same with the top and the bottom. We have two triangles there. And again, I overlap and they're not quite the center. So it gives us an opportunity to have things leading for four different corners. We can have them leading to different parts of the photo. Now, there's a lot of lines in here there was that we're using. It's not a bad complicating with extra things. What you really wanted to have is a simple distraction free photo and then your main visual elements, you want to have alumnis lines. Importantly, the intersecting lines is a really good as well to have just created bit more stronger composition, but try and simplify it using. In step four, we'll talk about how you can mute colors, reduce the contrast, and that sort of thing so that you think detract attention to life from certain areas of the photo and then bring your attention back to just the elements that are along those lines and then intersecting on those lines. Next one is focal points in hierarchy now at same strategy of Tibet. So I'm asked before I get to this point, I wanted to cover design initially and then I wanted to talk about the most transformational elements first, which are lines, all different types of lines. If now we're going to talk about focal points and the hierarchy. This is where I've touched on this already. It gets really exciting when you've got your main visual anchor, people go to first. So now we've got all different vocal points that provide that narrative. In the photo. The hierarchy is way we using leading lines. That's why I covered that first. Using leading lines and the size, shape contrast, that sort of thing that makes something stand out amongst the background. So we've got that figure to ground. So they have we covered that already, figured the grant. So that figure is the visual element. The focal point is something that stands out against the background. How much it stands out in relation to others, other parts of the file of the standard debt. That's the hierarchy where we go from one to the next to the next. And this is where it gets really excited with storytelling. Even if you don't have a story, you just trying to articulate visually, articulate the narrative of what's going on, what you want them to say. This hierarchy is like a visual journey. And you go from here to here to here. Now I get it. I navigate more intricate details to support their context of that, that message with e-tron and communicate whether it's a landscape, 6. Step 4 - Composition Editing - Straighten - Snapseed: The first editing tool for to support composition that I want to cover first is the most important one and that is straightening the photo. Now we've talked about previously bad straightening the horizon. How important these have, horizon strike. And that is because our brain knows that horizon, these striated and it doesn't matter how strong your attention, your composition, everything else that's happening, storytelling, beautiful colors, all these sorts of things. We will subconsciously know that there's something wrong with the photo, with the horizons not strike now. Yes. Sometimes having things on an angle like that. Django we talked about earlier case studying all that sort of thing. That's fantastic because you're doing that for visual tension and creating energy, that sort of thing. So what I'm showing you here is a way that you could further accentuate that and make that even more of an angle if you find that it might even be tilting the wrong way. So you can use the tools and uncovering heat to touching as well. Firstly, I'm gonna show you the rotate tool inside Snapseed steps. That is the main app that I'm going to use to show you these different tools and way where there's a tool that has another app that does that as a primary function of that app and it has a better job in Snapseed. Then I'll show you straighten the photo. Snap state does a great job. Lightroom if you have perspective issues, which we'll touch on lighter than the net has. Another great tool but for straightening. And if you already working inside Snapseed, then the next fantastic. Now rotate. If I go to the pencil, then I'll tap on rotate. You can see he now this works very similar to rotate feature inside your own inbuilt editor and you're fine. So to swap left and right. And you can see here and say, well it's happening. It's zooming in wallet crops navigating to the extreme here to highlight this. But you're losing so much. You can see the shaded gray there. You can see what you're going to lose when you let go and then you press the tick button. And it's not ideal, is it? Because, I mean, if you are innocent cluster that light has a net lighthouse is close to the edge of the frame. Then he got and try and straighten the horizon. You might end up cropping off that the top of that light has another tool that I want to show you that he's just fantastic is this one here? It's called perspective. It's right next to rotate, which is handy. You can say that rotate, tap on, rotate. It, get rid of that lower Thursday that the bottom B day just tap on the screen and that'll remove that. And you could say that you've got the arrows. Now if this was a really bad horizon, it will auto correct, but it's pretty good. So it didn't do that. Same thing swiped left and right. But before we do that in the center there, I want to tap on that center icon, which field shows you smartwatch or black? If I go to black and you can say they were started to straighten it, it will actually, that's the job, that's the end result. It'll leave that black bay. Not ideal. But what I want to show you is smart. How is that? That was pretty cool to say that when we do this, it will what it does as it's called Content Aware Fill. If you're familiar with Photoshop, what it does is it is aware of the content that is inside the frame, inside the border day, and it'll copy that and it will intelligently fill it in those areas. So he looked up the top right corner and let go. It fills it in with that sky. So you can see here that we're not actually very minimum, we were not really cropping anything. You can say that no matter which way I go that light has does not crop out. Whereas for when I use the Rotate tool, you can steal a scenario is the law. It has to spend cropped out. So it's just, it's just fantastic, is brilliant. Smart fill. Let go. It does the job. Now. You can see it on the bottom left there. The reason it went murky like that is because this non-real content on the other side of the frame there. So you've got some rocks, then you've got blue water is not a constant tone or color through this, it's going to hedge my bets. It's not always perfect, but it gives you a really strong starting point. Then you can go in and you can use healing and all sorts of different tools to do that. All crop that beat out if you need to. Later on, What are getting into healing and removing items is an app Touch retouch where you can actually tap on an area, use that as a reference and swap over that area and it'll copy in where you want to sample from. It will copy it and it's amazing how wide to show you that one. But here, I just wanted to show you here and he got the grid comes up when you do this as well. So you've got a real good visual reference. And so instead of using the rotate tool, use the prospective tool. It is, it is heaps better. 7. Step 4 - Composition Editing - Cropping - Lightroom: The next one I want to cover here is cropping. Cropping is the number one by far, most powerful composition editing tool that you can use. When I checked on Judge photo competition sets, camera clubs, select, and then I'll do a bit of feedback on everybody's photos. And then I'll do a feedback for the whole group. Common themes that are picked up on always cropping, like just taking the time to recompose the photo by cropping it. You can get right back into that photo intention. Make that hero or that area that you're emphasizing, the visual anchor, that sort of thing. You could just make it pop and stand in a lot more with a toddler co-op, or just removing things from the edges just by having just a slot crop. That's what we're gonna get into heat. And again, I'm using the Snapseed app. And this is available on every editing app. This copying feature built in that it has a very limited number of tools. It'll always have crop. Here we asked, I've just got this example here again. So tap on the pencil to crop in here, depending on if you're holding this horizontal or vertical, you might not see all these aspect ratios come up here. So you might have to swipe to the right to bring up that free with that free one where you can just go. Don't have to stick to it. Particular aspect ratio. And if you're just taking the photos of yourself, social media, we're not planning on printing them, putting in a frame, then it doesn't need to stick to a particular aspect ratio. For me. A lot of my photos I display on your screen at home, on a TV screen, it says 69. So for me, 69 makes sense to crop all my photos that way. Now I've mentioned earlier about oscillating the subjects. These might be an area where you, where you might need to crop it to remove distracting elements from the board or that kind of pulls your attention away from the main subject. You want that to really delighted and separated from everything else going on. It could be that if you remember Border Patrol, I talked about Border Patrol earlier where you go around the edges and go, you know what? The water there along the bottom there. It's really it's a different tone or rather it be clean and the same color and tone all the way through. So you might do that and then you go. Now the rocks there, they kind of cut off awkwardly, so much, going just a little bit tighter and go. Perfect. There we go. That's really nice. I like that. Now. As it turns out, the lighthouse is now on that rule of thirds and I wanted to take up two-thirds. So then our Marco zoom in or zoom out and just play around with it a little bit. You want to have a little bit of space around the edges range your items. That I think is looking quite nice if I get too close to the light hash, you can say that it doesn't have that room to breathe that we talked about earlier. You need to have some space around it so we can go that way. Then the horizon is smack bang in the middle, isn't it? Even though the lighthouse is on that rule of thirds, that looks really good. But the horizons right there. So if I bring this down a little bit, now, the subject, well, the majority of the photo is the foreground and the full grand leads to the lighthouse. So it kind of tells the story a little bit more. Whereas here you're looking at that blue Scott, the top there and it's not really adding to the story he, so we can go that way. And I think that looks really nice. The other considerations we've talked about previously, balance. So cropping heavily on one side mites reduce or increase the visual weight of the elements on one side of the frame because by cropping one side and bringing, dragging it in like this. Now, that's awkwardly cut off, that's fine. Just for example, now we have heavy visual weight in that bottom right corner. Whereas if I go this way and copy it to something like that, now the visual weight is kind of shifted a little bit. We can write its height it that way. So many options, so many variations where changing the aspect, the orientation, and dragging a corner will change the visual white and just change the whole field and mood and look and the visual direction that people will take. So as you can see, it's a really popular way of doing it. If you have people also remember that awkwardly cutoff arms or legs, that sort of thing. Just try and contain everyone in their portraits. There's a lot of debate whether to do the forehead cutoff with the forehead or headspace above the head. It's a trained thing a while the portrait photographers to specialize in headshots would sign. This is the way to go. And then years later, this is the way to go. There is no right and wrong. It's just understanding that when you crop something, the impact that it has, whether it's a positive impact or a negative impact. Sometimes that negative impact is this visual tension, visual attention and can really make the photo more engaging. So again, these rules, they, they just to help you understand and improve your visual literacy so that when you go to a really weird crop, understand what it's doing and why you're doing it and go for it. Why not? 8. Step 4 - Composition Editing - Cropping - Snapseed: The next one I want to cover here is cropping. Cropping is the number one by far, most powerful composition editing tool that you can use. When I checked on Judge photo competition sets, camera clubs, select, and then I'll do a bit of feedback on everybody's photos. And then I'll do a feedback for the whole group. Common themes that are picked up on always cropping, like just taking the time to recompose the photo by cropping it. You can get right back into that photo intention. Make that hero or that area that you're emphasizing, the visual anchor, that sort of thing. You could just make it pop and stand in a lot more with a toddler co-op, or just removing things from the edges just by having just a slot crop. That's what we're gonna get into heat. And again, I'm using the Snapseed app. And this is available on every editing app. This copying feature built in that it has a very limited number of tools. It'll always have crop. Here we asked, I've just got this example here again. So tap on the pencil to crop in here, depending on if you're holding this horizontal or vertical, you might not see all these aspect ratios come up here. So you might have to swipe to the right to bring up that free with that free one where you can just go. Don't have to stick to it. Particular aspect ratio. And if you're just taking the photos of yourself, social media, we're not planning on printing them, putting in a frame, then it doesn't need to stick to a particular aspect ratio. For me. A lot of my photos I display on your screen at home, on a TV screen, it says 69. So for me, 69 makes sense to crop all my photos that way. Now I've mentioned earlier about oscillating the subjects. These might be an area where you, where you might need to crop it to remove distracting elements from the board or that kind of pulls your attention away from the main subject. You want that to really delighted and separated from everything else going on. It could be that if you remember Border Patrol, I talked about Border Patrol earlier where you go around the edges and go, you know what? The water there along the bottom there. It's really it's a different tone or rather it be clean and the same color and tone all the way through. So you might do that and then you go. Now the rocks there, they kind of cut off awkwardly, so much, going just a little bit tighter and go. Perfect. There we go. That's really nice. I like that. Now. As it turns out, the lighthouse is now on that rule of thirds and I wanted to take up two-thirds. So then our Marco zoom in or zoom out and just play around with it a little bit. You want to have a little bit of space around the edges range your items. That I think is looking quite nice if I get too close to the light hash, you can say that it doesn't have that room to breathe that we talked about earlier. You need to have some space around it so we can go that way. Then the horizon is smack bang in the middle, isn't it? Even though the lighthouse is on that rule of thirds, that looks really good. But the horizons right there. So if I bring this down a little bit, now, the subject, well, the majority of the photo is the foreground and the full grand leads to the lighthouse. So it kind of tells the story a little bit more. Whereas here you're looking at that blue Scott, the top there and it's not really adding to the story he, so we can go that way. And I think that looks really nice. The other considerations we've talked about previously, balance. So cropping heavily on one side mites reduce or increase the visual weight of the elements on one side of the frame because by cropping one side and bringing, dragging it in like this. Now, that's awkwardly cut off, that's fine. Just for example, now we have heavy visual weight in that bottom right corner. Whereas if I go this way and copy it to something like that, now the visual weight is kind of shifted a little bit. We can write its height it that way. So many options, so many variations where changing the aspect, the orientation, and dragging a corner will change the visual white and just change the whole field and mood and look and the visual direction that people will take. So as you can see, it's a really popular way of doing it. If you have people also remember that awkwardly cutoff arms or legs, that sort of thing. Just try and contain everyone in their portraits. There's a lot of debate whether to do the forehead cutoff with the forehead or headspace above the head. It's a trained thing a while the portrait photographers to specialize in headshots would sign. This is the way to go. And then years later, this is the way to go. There is no right and wrong. It's just understanding that when you crop something, the impact that it has, whether it's a positive impact or a negative impact. Sometimes that negative impact is this visual tension, visual attention and can really make the photo more engaging. So again, these rules, they, they just to help you understand and improve your visual literacy so that when you go to a really weird crop, understand what it's doing and why you're doing it and go for it. Why not? 9. Step 4 - Composition Editing - Change Perspective : The next tool I want to cover is perspective. So back into Snapseed, we go tap on the pencil. We've been here before, perspective. We touched on row tight and that's a fantastic one to straighten teens and not lose things by cropping it at the same time. So we've got three out of his head tilt style and free form. Again, tapping on that icon in the middle, we're going to leave it at smart so that it will, it'll intelligently copy the content inside the frame and fill it in, which is just works so well. So we can leave it there. Back. I have a T here. So tilt. First of all, you've got two directions. You've got up and down, left and right. So let's have a look at what it does. So up and down. How cool is this? One of the issues we talked about earlier was tilt distortion. And that is when you have a lower angle, you tilt the camera of the smartphone and the walls will go like that. So for interior shots, if you recall, recommendation was for real estate managers, that sort of thing, OS try and shoot the spice directly from the midway point between the floor and the ceiling. And that way you're shooting straight ahead and hold the camera and OS and vertical, the smartphone, nice and vertical. And what that does is that reduces this sort of result that sometimes this can be used to for your effects. So you might want to go this way and make it look more Granger and more big. And it's not just a correction thing, it can also be a creative thing. Again, we've got, as we do this in hold their finger there, we've got these reference lines to help us tap on there again. The next one here is scale. This one is really cool. I use this occasionally. It totally depends on the content of your photo. And sometimes when you when you start rotating things and you start mucking around with it, it can upset the proportions of the photo. So this is really good way of avenues. You could stretch it. You can compress it and have a look at that. This will, again, it can either be a correction thing or a creative thing where you can turn E1, E2, it absolute panoramic and that's really cool. Now when I let go, it's going to fill in those areas. But knowing that we got into crop, so we hold that finger there and go, okay, I'm going to turn this into a panoramic That's looking really good. All the rocks are looking a bit flat. The light has, is not the right proportion. Now, what you can do, and I'll show you the slider is using an app called handy photo. We can actually do this. We locked the foreground, we'd like it to compress like that. And then what you can do is you can get back to the original photo, pick up that lot has, copy it, and then you can go back into heat and you can paste it on top of it. It's really cool. It's a lot of fun. It's called compositing, and it's a little bit intimidating if you haven't done it before. But that app handy photo available on Android and iPhone is fantastic. It's great way to get into that sort of, that sort of compositional, that font. Let's scale and you can go to the otherwise, well, you can stretch it. You can see here we might want to go that way and then stretch it. Just stretch, stretch, stretch, stretch. Actually that's not looking too bad, is it? It's actually really cool. So effectively what we've done is we've just zoomed in by doing that. But so we just did that really. You can see that you can have some fonts. Bring that back up again. The last one I want to show you there is free, free form. This is really cool. It's really handy so you can pick up a corner and you can get credit, and you get yourself into trouble. You can go crazy and you can drag things out and you can compress the foreground, make the full ground look smaller. But then you can see here, we've managed to retain the height of the before and after. The light has to stay exactly the same height. But you can see there the foreground has been compressed. So then when we crop this, we can, there we go. When we crop it, then it's actually turns into a panoramic kind of aspect ratio. So fray form is really, really handy for that. That's great. All right, another tool I want to show you here is installed picks out PICS. This one again is available on Google Play and the App Store. Most devices can access this also is available in your browser as well. You can access picks out.com. Now what I love about this one is that we open up to the app. Now when you open it up this app, it'll try really hard to encourage you to download the well subscribe to picks out. You don't need to just be patient wife for the X to come up and you could do it that way. Now, when you've opened your photo, go to Tools and then install tools, you've got lots of options here. The one we're looking for is stretch. Now you've got lots of options in here. Squeeze and in flight is, let's just have a quick look. So we squeeze, hold a finger there and so it's happening. Now. I can't I can't edit this in horizontal. So that's why we're now looking at this. And you can go in flight and you can hold your finger there. And it'll do all sorts of funky stuff for the one I want to show you here is warp. Alright, so tap on there. Now with that finger, we can drag and we can stretch elements in the frame. So this is kind of like liquefy that you might be familiar with that editing tool. Freeform inside snap, say when you drag it, it impacts on a large area. Whereas here we can pinch and zoom and we can just go in and just stretch and warp individual elements. We might be a rock, they might go, you know what? I want to reduce that. And you can go in there. The closer your pinch and zoom, the more refined that area that you're stretching. We go into here, you know what, we want to make that look a bit taller so we can go in there and like that. How cool is that? Now, you can say, we've stretched that window and it looks bigger. Might look more, drawing our attention to it. Or it might be beat board, true or authentic representation of what's there. But you can see there down the bottom that's upset that lawns we can go in here and go restore. Then we can go and just wipe across. And it'll undo that area. So hex codes that before, after. Pretty cool. That's one example where I was going to do this shoreline. I can go in here the shoreline and do you know what I want to extend that whole shoreline. Just be mindful that when you do this, you might be stretching the rocks and you might want to play around with it a little bit. Zoom out, impact on more area. Here we go. That's looking good. And you said it was starting to get some sharp edges. They mock going there, restore, backup to those edges. That's looking funky. Anyway, you get the point of what I'm trying to, trying to achieve here. There's the before, there's the after. So we have extended that shoreline. That's inside pixel. Go to Tools, stretch, warp, and then, and then you've got lots of options inside here. That's a really cool one. 10. Step 4 - Composition Editing - Re-compos - Snapseed Expand Tool: The next Total want to show you inside snap said is expanded and this is one that is quite unique and DOE many apps that they have, this works so well, I love it. I go into the pencil, we go to expand. And you can say, Hey, straightaway, it opens it up like this. Now what this does is it allows you to add extra canvas TO frame. It's pretty cool. That's exactly this time is when we're using those other options of perspective, you easily rotate inside perspective where you rotate it and it goes and fuels in using the information inside the frame. Guys who feels any, this does the same thing. So you can actually just pinch and zoom like that and you can say, what's going to happen. Let me guess. It's copying areas and it's going to fill it in. Now the rocks are gonna go really funky here because we're gonna just such a big area where adding a large area, it's going to go deeper into the fight or copy it side's gonna go really funky. Yeah, Not great. But if we go back and we add just a little bit, you can see there it's a much cleaner result. And then we do a little bit at a time and a little bit extra, little bit extra. That one wasn't so great. It's really handy. Way. This is really handy is if you've taken a photo for three aspect ratio, which is the one that gives you the highest number of pixels and Information at capture time to get the most amount of resolution in your photos shouldn't have full three and then go and crop at sixth day. Not unlike I talked about earlier. Sometimes though, a 43 you go I've gone over the framed really nicely. I just want it to be wider. Going to expand. Look for an option like here, this along the edge here. This will work. Lovely. How cool was that? That was so cool. Expand the top there. I'm just works. It just works so well. Again, it depends on the context and the content of the scene as to what a copies might have little imperfections, but it's so easy to just go in there and just clean it up a little bit. But that's super cool that you can just add extra room to Canvas and change the aspect ratio without having to change anything inside it. 11. Step 4 - Composition Editing - Add Depth - Differential Focus: All right, The next composition tool I want to show you is differential focus. So it's the depth. It is where things are out of focus. Things in the foreground are in focus. Now, as I touched on earlier, when I was covering that in this steps, is that not always? It doesn't always have to be that way. It can be that the background is in focus and the foreground is out of focus. Now, one of the things I love about smartphones is more often than not, everything is in focus and it's great to get that depth of field. And it's one thing that the big camera people are around the economy jealous of because I have to use all sorts of different lenses and aperture settings and all technical stuff too, and even stack photos, post-production to try and achieve the same thing that we can just do automatically and smartphones. Now the tool I want to use here inside snap said is Lens Blur and go into the pencil. We can say it he's swapping up Lens Blur. But default, it adds this circle, elliptical, they call it a elliptical. Just tap down the icon there and you can change it to linear. Always use a linear, I never use elliptical, the circle one because linear is how a real camera works. It's a process called depth of field. So you will have, if you have a shallow depth of field, then that means that distance between you and the subject is out-of-focus. There's a small focal point or small range. Their focal range that's in focus. Beyond that, it goes out of focus again. It's a transition from out-of-focus into focus and then transitions again, out-of-focus. That's how this works and it works in distance to camera, not not edge of the frame. If you're familiar with, with photography and photos and you'll see that new guy. It doesn't quite work. Another thing he did I get rid of is the vignette strength. So I'll get rid of the vignette because I'm not in this tool to use a vignette. We actually have a vignette tool and we don't get to vignette. I'll show you how to do it in a large room. It's so much better if tapped on a couple of things there. Now this one here, the little cuts there. This is different shapes of the blur I just lived on one, when you start doing love hot, Bokeh at all that sort of have apply. Why not jumping to have a look. But I leave it at that default, the vignette strength down to 0. So the two things I'm looking at here is the blurring strengths and the transition. The transition. You can actually tap on that and activate the blue icon. You can actually use your fingers there to select the area that is in focus. Ahmad Mike, just that area in focus, the full grant or just want the full grant interest in focus in this example. Then typo in here. And we can go transition and you can reduce or expand. To go to the extreme, there is no transition such as in-focus bank out of focus. But I like to have a transition sided. It looks more natural and realistic. That's looking really good. Then got to replace strength. We can make it look ridiculous. Bring it back to where there's sufficient data, how they are, we know what it is, but our eye goes to it and then it comes back to the foreground because that's what's in focus. And then if we want to make the, we could do it this way. Just by dragging it, we can do it that way, which looks really good. I actually like. I actually, you know what, I actually liked that better. Everyone takes photos a lot houses. Why not take a photo of a rock and have the Lord has as a contextual element. Another option for to Lens Blur is get rid of that back. Another option for lens blur if you don't want to do that and it gets a bit messy and that sort of thing is going to details. Okay? You've got two options, each structure and sharpening. Sharpening will go and shop in every pixel indiscriminately every, every pixel. And you can't get a negative value, you can only get a positive value. Whereas with structure, we go in here, have a look at this. We can go negative and look what it's doing that AT is actually blurring everything. And is this actually looks much cleaner and more natural than the lens blur. And it's actually my favorite one I want to blow things is to actually go in there because lens below we'll just learn, oh, we'll blow all definition where it's structured. We were tying with it some strong contrast lines. It will actually retain some of that but still apply blurry. So it's at some, it's fantastic. I really think it's a great tool that many people are unaware of because when you think of chopping the ongoing there, the shop and things, you didn't actually think the guard is shopping to blur things because you've got to upload tool. This is really cool. And then again, we can go into he view edits, get rid of that lens blur, trash it. Going to hear today tiles. And you say How much cleaner that is? How can go in here and go pencil? I will apply a 100% to all of it. Just swap over all of it, then go down to 50% and swap back over the lighthouse. And it has that, that looks much better, doesn't it? 12. Step 4 - Composition Editing - Add Depth - Sselective Tonal Contrast Dodge & Burn: The next compositional editing tool that I want to cover here is contrast. Now, this is not what do you think? Contrast selective editing. It's not really composition. But if you go back to the definition of composition, and that is attracting, holding, and directing the attention of people through the placement of the mind subject and elements in the frame. Then, by using selective edits and changing the way things kind of pop out and jump, then that is composition, at least at is helping that composition. That's what step four is all about, is enhancing the composition that you already have. Steps 123. Now there's a number of different ways to increase the contrast in areas. My favorite is actual total tonal contrast. So we go into the pencil again, pencil and we have tonal contrast. We can see here it'll add contrast to the high, high tones highlights mid tones and the low tones being the shadows. We can do that and then we can go into the view edit and we can mask and apply it exactly where we want. And that actually works really well. Let's just do that really quickly. And then what I'm going to show you is how to use the brush and a tool called Dodge and Burn. It's really good for getting you to those fine details. But let's do this 1 first. Now the area that I want to apply most of the sharpening is the shadows, which is the rock. So let's go to the extreme and mid tones. Let's go in there. Alright, so we can say before and after, I'm just looking at the rocks and not worrying about the sky and the horizon and how it's made the colors a bit murky. Don't worry about that for now, just looking at the rocks. Now, going into that view edits that we had before, view edits masking. And this is why it's really initially, when I first came across this of thought, why doesn't it just comes straightaway and show me what I applied and then I can go and remove it, but it's easier to do it this way. If you want to see everything, then we've got this icon down the bottom left here. The invert, you can invert and apply at all, okay? Tap that either way. Pretty cool. When you do that, you then you either applying a 100% of the effect or 0% of defects or you could either adding or subtracting it. Still with me. Makes sense. All right. I'm now adding it. So now in a pinch and zoom. And I want to go into some of these areas where I want things to highlight and stand out. So I might look for these areas inside the photo where there's existing bright areas. And I'm just swapping over those areas to make them pop and stand out more. And that's all I'm trying to achieve here is just draw attention to these areas. Now, they might be areas here inside this rock formation or whatever it is that you're editing where you wanted to draw attention to that because it's a murky color doesn't quite add to it. So that's why this selective editing like this is actually really cool and very powerful to control exactly where your attention, to, where you want the attention to go. So you can see here before, after, That's really cool. Forgot to 0, zoom out, swap ever at all. Then that's all gone. Now the reason I did that, I want to show you something here. If I go a 100%, what about do is I might want to control your eye to go straight to that Lie hat. Inside the Roxy, what I can do have a look at these. I can swap just a line. I can swap a line. The rocks there. If I do the pencil, you'll see exactly what I've done going there and just clean it up a little bit. Clean it up. Add a little bit more here. So we pick up your attention rod across the bottom there. And then I want you to go and follow that line. There's the original and there's the after. Say how it just, by adding that selective contrast with doing exactly that. Now, the next tool I want to show you here is the brush. Go into brush and Dodge and Burn. Now the Dodge and Burn is like an old film. What processing process where you either burn it or its object brought in a dock and selective areas. It's a bit more gentle than say, exposure by just going into this lighthouse, actually forgot to exposure. Boom. I mean, that's really cool if I want to bring it back white, if it's a lighthouse, that's really strong, isn't it? So I can go down and make good 0.3.7 to the eraser and get rid of it. So you can say that exposure is really strong. So I'll tap on the brush, bring up dodge and burn. And the maximum value here, say that it's less than that 0.3. But what I love about this dodge and burn for, for brightening things, well documented things easy swap over it and it will compound and it will increase in its intensity so far just keeps swapping, swapping, swapping all eventually get to that effect that I had with the other one. I can just erase it. But way this is what I love, is that it's gentle, It's subtle, it looks realistic. So I'm gonna go plus ten. And that same area when I had before, I'm just going to swap over and we're going to pick up some areas that have existing highlights and just swap over it. If I'm locking it, I'll just go over it and over and over. That's looking really good. That's looking a bit too strong. I might go in there and just reduce it with the minus five. And the contrast is that you might want to also where there's some shadows in this area of gone minus ten. And now I'm going to paint over those shadows and make those really contrast against the areas of it. So there we go. Now we're looking at before and after. So you can see there that our eye is picking up that rock so that reflective surface. And it's following that even though we do already structurally, we have that there by editing it inside step four here we're actually, we're enhancing that viewer experience. And you'll hear me say that a bit enhancing the viewer experience because that's exactly what we're doing. It's odd, it's fun. I encourage you to have a go at that, either using tonal contrast and then using masking or use these brush tool like we did here, use a combination of both. Why not? 13. Srep 4 - Composition Editing - Remove Objects to Simplify the Photo: You've heard me talking about this quite a bit now. And that is simplifying the scene and removing distracting elements. Inside snap, say there is a fantastic tool called Healing does a great job if you're already part of fuel process, you're inside steps they doing to NIMH, tunnel contrast or they sort of cool stuff that you can do in perspective control. Then healing, give it a go if it works, fantastic. Remember pinch and zoom getting these clusters, you can try and give it a bit of a helping hand to reduce the amount of sample area that it uses. The try and copy and filling works amazing. Touch Rey touches a really cheap app is like $2.99 by ad for soft. And they're just about to release a new version. I will update it as soon as the warning for wall and that's to add any day. But I wanted to get this video recorded for you because I realized that the new version as a slightly different interface, but what I'm gonna show you, the content is exactly the sign. They're just tools might be slightly different, so the concept is still the same. So touch Rey touches the app. I'm going to bring that up now and show you. So I'm gonna use this example again. What we do is there's a couple of different ways here. We've got object removal, quick repay, lawn removal and clone stamp. I'm going to focus here on quick repay. What I want to do is just go in and I'm not want to tap on the ACT, divide it on what we wanted to get rid of this bit here. This works the same way as Snapseed, samples everything around it and then fills the dean. So there's the before, there's the after. And you can say they were swapped diver, it's picked up the other part and then copy that in. So it didn't it did a good job, not a perfect job. The next one I want to show you here, which is really exciting, is clone stamp. Now what I can do is I can take the guesswork out of it for it is I can say, hey, this area here. And I'm going to try and this is what's going to change and the new version, the way this looks, it's gonna look a little bit different. Change the size. Now. Hey, you feeling from where I've sampled, I've sampled over there. And you fill in from there as I drag, I can change it the hardness log omega really hard or really soft. And you see here I've got a bit of, bit of duplication here, so I'm just going to swap. You can play around with this and make it look really natural and smooth. Now I've got a sharp edge here. I want to go to the sharp edge and I want to go along there. Now. That doesn't have sharp edges. So that doesn't look right. So I'm going to bring that back a bit. Try again. That looks better, doesn't it look more natural and fits in with what's going on there? We're gonna do the same here around. Zoom out, change the opacity so that it blends in a little bit more. Equals that. It's so cool, I love it. This is one of those things that turned me into a mobile purest. Once I realized you could do these kind of Photoshop stuff, it's just completely blew me away. This is a fantastic app. If it doesn't look quite normal, just come back out a bit and you know what, we can fill in that whole area and do it that way. There we go. That's looking better by reducing the opacity kind of blends in a bit. And it brings your attention back to what's going on, removing those distracting elements. Now there's otherwise removing distracting elements. You can go in there and use the selective tool inside snap, say, drop a pin on it, reduce the saturation day tiles or structure, that sort of thing. You can do all that but removing it through a healing inside Snapseed or touch re touch with clowning, adjust. It doesn't amazing job to clean the fido and just make it more simple and really draw your attention to those compositional techniques and where you want the eye to go. It's a good font. And getting there and have a go at it. 14. Step 4 - Composition Editing - Add a Vignette the Best Way - Lightroom: The next tool I want to show you is vignette. A vignette is where you darken up, brought in the edges of the frame. Now I've shown you inside Snapseed how to apply that. There's a couple of, a couple of ways inside lens blur. There's a vignette adjustment and also using vignette there as well. I wanted to show you in Salt Lightroom because it does a much better job. Now if I open this up inside Lightroom and we got to the tools here and we're going to the effects panel. And depending on which way you're holding your phone, these little icons will either say what they are or it will just be an icon. I have it here. So I'm going to just go to vignette. And you can say at the moment there that it's nothing there to plot 0. Whenever I'm applying vignette all locks, we might get 100% either way, bright or dark. I'm not going to leave it there. What I'm gonna do is then you say that as soon as we applied one setting here, the midpoint feather roundness highlights all day. He then became active. You can say this and now I can play around with just having experiments. So what it does midpoint changes the area there in the middle. We might want to make the midpoint about there. Feathering is how strong that transition is from the dark to the light. I want to make it probably maximum. Roundness is changes again, just like the midpoint changes the shape of the area that you want, the vignette applied to highlight that this is really cool. This is unique to Lightroom. If I move that to the right, then if there's any existing broad areas within that dark edges, like a nice bokeh or something like that. It will actually retiring that brought day tiles. So that's really cool here. It doesn't matter so much gray, I'm not gonna worry about that. That's a separate thing. Those settings right now I can go back to vignette and I can go back and go, You know what, I'm going to bring that back a little bit. Now for me. Finally, like this doesn't really, a Vignette doesn't really work because it's a blue sky. Scars don't have dark edges, but a lot of other photos, it looks amazing. I just wanted to keep this consistent with the same photo, but if I go into another photo, okay, So this one was captured on tennis max with streaming uptakes, cinematic macro lens. You can say that incredible details I've already played around with these to bring out the data's going to vignette. You can see here I've applied a little bit. I'm gonna go in there and maximize through the same process. Go in here, play around. I want about their feathering. I want to it really feather it. Roundness. Bring a writing this. So the focal point is rod on the bay and highlights. This is where I actually want to bring the highlights back. I don't want to lose those bright areas for their contextual elements there. Then vignette and then I'll bring that strength back. So that's back to cluster 0, that's 0. And you can see this further, really does benefit from a strong vignette where there's nice guy or water where it kind of looks a bit weird, murky and yucky. A photo like this, a strong vignette really does help now, you can also use snap setting onto the brush tool using exposure or the Dodge and Burn. And you can go in and also do the same thing if you do apply the if vignette inside Snapseed. Remember you can also go into view edits. And you can go back and you can select 0 brush and you get to undo. If there's a sky in the photo, you really want to vignette for the doc and the ages around the bottom corner. You could still do it. And then you can go and brush and you can apply it in the bottom area and take it out of the top so you can mask it exactly where any edit the easy Inside Snapseed to apply it exactly where you want, which is super cool. 15. Step 4- Composition Editing - Add a Sun Flare - Adding an Element: You've probably seen a lot of photos on photo sharing apps where they have a sun flare or sunburst or something like that. And create that light afternoon warm, cozy feeling. I can look fantastic. Backlighting natural values. Compose the photos always the best way if you count do that though. And the lighting and where there's shadows and light hitting surfaces, it makes sense to have a sunburst or a sudden in one particular photo. You could do that using an app. My favorite here is inside picks out here. If I go to Tools, then the bottom here we swap all the way across to the right here. And you can see lens flare, so I can tap on that. And you've got a few different options here to choose from. It is limited range, but it's pretty cool. Let's go with that one there. And then I can go and drag that to where I want. Beyond he, I can change the hue, the color, I can change the color. I can look what I want that matches nicely. Put that right on the horizon. I can turn that around a little bit so the sun flake guys where I want it, then I can change the opacity so that it's not as in your face. Look I've touched on Pixabay is free on Android and iPhone, an iPhone app that I love to use these lens light or find that really works for this sort of thing. You can go in and you can mask it. You can change the amount of the flare out effects and all that sort of things. That's super cool lab. I just wanted to show you something that everybody can use here inside peaks out, it's nice and easy. 16. Step 4 - Composition Editing - Move Any Object in the Photo - HandyPhoto App: We've made it to the very end. So the last one I want to show you here is an app called handy photo. This is a fantastic for when you have elements inside the photo that we might have issues with that lens of the camera distortion where things look smaller at a distance. We want to make more like it looked like in the real world when we were looking at that. We want to increase the size of it. So using this example again of the lot has fido. Let's bring that up now. I've opened it up. First thing I'll do is tap on the head and I'll go to move me. I want to move it. And you've got a couple of options. See Lasso, you can go around the outside of the walking aids or the paintbrush, pinch and zoom. That's one of the things every app that I talked about that I recommend this is a critical thing for me, is that you can pinch and zoom. There's no point having editing apps where you're just looking at these tiny little screen and you can't quite see what you're doing. And so you always, always select ones that have that way you can pinch and zoom and getting the loss and close because you're gonna be much more accurate like this. Okay, so we're gonna go in here, select that my pickup, the Rock says I've got the platform. Bit of a rough and ready, That's all good. Next thing on the icons on the right day. So we're gonna choose the middle one there, where I now move it to a new area and have a look at this one, I drag it. This is the same developer that brings you touch re, touch. Now the horizon there is not quite right, but we can fix that using touch re touch or I can bring it somewhere else. So I'm going to drag it to about there and drag a day. Next thing I'll do, top one where I can just place it. Or you could say they were the person and the other the ground. You can actually copy that and place that into another photo, which is really cool. But I'm gonna go to the second one, they, and I'm just going to pop it on top. You can say He, we've, we've done that, we've moved it. There is this example. There's a little bit of imperfection behind the lighthouse. We've got different tones and all that sort of thing. But for other photos where you don't have such a delicate, soft, smooth background, you won't even notice it. But I just wanted to show you the concept with the fight either you are already familiar with. So that's handy photo again, this is like $2.99 less than a cup of coffee. And it's a lot of fun. And it's a way that you can move elements that you can't physically move in the same linear, they change the composition.