Layered Photography 101: Unlock Your Creativity With Composition

1. Introduction: Using layers in photography is a technique that can totally change the way you capture images by adding complexity and a touch of chaos in your compositions. Your photos will stand so motion. They will feel more interesting, more authentic, and they will capture the true essence of real post moments. Hello, I'm Robert and joining me in this class as a guest teacher is my wife, Sonny together, We run a wedding filmmaking and photography business that has taken us all over the world. Photography is not only our job, but it is such an important part of who we are. We love going out and shooting the streets in Mexico where we live. We also love documenting our everyday lives. We capture moments, whether we are meeting with family, friends, or even if we're just going out for a walk with our little ducks. In this class, we will guide you through the art of your photography. Well, this technique may seem advanced. We assure you that it can be learned by anyone who wants to go beyond the basics, will demystify the process and show you how to create impressive compositions. Our goal with this class is to make it simple for you to understand, starting with the foundations and building your skills. From there, we will start by explaining what layer photography is. We will analyze some basic composition techniques that will serve as your took when shooting for layers. From there, we will explore specific considerations when shooting with layers in mind. And finally, we will talk about cropping and how the simple tool can help you grow more as a photographer and at the same time elevate your compositions. This class is great if you're just getting started in photography because we will be approaching the subject from a very non technical perspective. Yes, we will talk a little bit about **** aperture and even **** compression, but don't get scared by these words. In the end, our goal is to show you that everyone can make this layered image by simple knowing what you're looking for through the glass. We will be showing analyzing work we have done with murals cameras, but also a lot of things that we have shot on our phone. You do not need a big professional camera for this class. If you put a phone with a camera on it, that will be good enough. Our hope is that this class will inspire you to capture the world around you with a fresh perspective. You will learn a powerful technique that will take your photography to a new level. You can apply this to any style of photography you're interested in. So get ready. We will start with some theory and later we will jump into more practical stuff. See you in the first session. See you there. 2. Understanding Layered Photography: Welcome, We are thrilled to have you join us in this class about layered photography. Before we jump into the techniques and all the practical stuff, let's take a moment to talk about the concept itself. Layered photography can mean different things to different people. Throughout this class, we hope to help you discover your own personal perspective on this technique. But first, let's make sure that we're on the same page. Layered photography is when you put different things together in one picture to make a cool and inciting. Instead of just showing one thing, you show many things to make the picture more interesting. To do this, you need to carefully place the things you want to show in the front, middle, and the background of the picture. Now, why do we use this technique? What's the goal when using layers? The answer is simple. We want to add depth, dimension, and meaning to our images. Layers, like other composition techniques, guide the viewer's eye throughout the image. But layers also serve as a powerful tool for visual storytelling by intentionally deciding what to include or exclude in our compositions. By being conscious of the placement of elements, we can capture the essence of a moment in a way that is truly remarkable. When layers are used well, they can make you stop and look closely at a picture. They can grab your attention with all the things happening in the picture. You may have already taken layered pictures before without knowing it. But if you understand and started this technique, you can start using it on papers. The more you think about layering, the better you will be at taking pictures that match what you want to show. It also helps you to see the possibilities of a picture. Well, you're taking it, editing it, or even cropping it. Let's talk about some use, key scenarios for layered photography. First, every day photography, you can apply layered photography to every day situations such as photographing family gatherings or the people that you love or that hang out with. You have the power to create, captivating, and visually reach images by capturing moments that hold special meaning to you. Adding your own personal touch is really nice. Now let's talk about the street photography. When you see layers in street photography, it makes the story more interesting. You can capture the feeling of a place, is a great way to show the interesting things happening on the streets. Documentary photography is another area where layered photography shines. By including multiple elements or subjects within a single frame, you can convey complex narratives, profound impact on the viewer. It's all about capturing layers of stories within each shot. In winding photography, using layers gives you a new way of looking at things. It lets you capture not just the messing you're taking a picture of, but also what surrounded this. Make your picture feel more alive and inciting. Okay, now that we're starting to understand more about the concept, let's go back a tiny bit and talk about some important composition principles that will be very helpful to us once we start incorporating these layers in our photos. 3. Essential Composition Principles: Before we go deeper in the whole concept of layers, let's take a moment to understand the importance of composition. This is what helps us create images that are not flat and make something dynamic or with a sense of immersion when we see things our man understand more than just what's right in front of us. As people who take pictures, we try to make our photos feel like you are really there in that moment. That's where composition comes into play. It's all about intentionally filling the frame with elements organized or distributed in such a way that they contribute to the story or message that we want to convey. By eliminating distractions and finding the correct balance, guide the viewers attention and make our images communicate more effectively. We think about what's in the photo, the colors, the light, and other things. It's important that we pay attention on how composition helps us to tell a story with our pictures. It's really important to know about this before we try to add more stuff or interesting points to our photos. Perhaps one of the most fundamental composition principles is the rule of thirds. It involves dividing the frame into thirds and placing our subjects at the spots where the imaginary lines intercept. This technique creates visually balanced and engaging images. If you want something a bit more advanced, you can look into the golden rectangle, also called the Fibonacci spiral, which I prefer over the rule of thirds. This adds more dynamism by following this line and placing elements of importance around or under it. Another compensation idea to think about when taking a photo is using lines. And let your eye these lines could be things like streets, fences, or river that help guide your eyes through the picture And make the picture feel like it's moving. Give it more depth. Oh, and we cannot forget about framing. It's a way to use elements like windows, doorways, or trees to enclose or surround our subjects. The human eye naturally gravitates towards these shapes that have a sense of geometry, instantly drawing attention to our point of interest. So now we have four things to think about when we take a photo. The role of cert, the spiral composition, framing, and the lines that let your eye using these ideas, we can make it interesting photos even if there's only one thing to look at. However, the real challenge comes when we start to introduce multiple points of interest while still using these composition ideas. This is where we will now be able to start building layers. I hope that you are ready because next lesson you will have a lot to take in and a lot to practice. I believe this is the right time to discuss your class project. As your poorly guest, we want you to take your camera and try out everything we have discussed. Especially what you will learn in the next two classes about layering. You can use any camera you have available. We will not be pixel peeping here. We actually shoot a lot with our phones when we're not in a professional setting. Specifically, we want you to post a project with about three to five of your favorite photos that you take. And we know that good photos speak for themselves, but we would love for you to share something about your experience here as what you liked. What was difficult, where you did well. Oh, what you want to get better at. We think that layer photography is great for getting real and natural movement. But if you don't like this style, we still want to say how you use these ideas in a different way of taking pictures. We just want to know that you got something from this class. You want constructive feedback on your photos, let us know. But if you just want to show what you have captured, we're also okay with that. Remember, your photos must have at least more than one point of interest for them to be considered layered photos. Hopefully, you're applying some of the composition techniques that we have discussed here to put it all together. The next section is more practical. We will discuss lenses and different ways to direct wheeler size. You will also get more ideas on how to make your photo feel balanced like we talked about here. We'll see you there. See you. 4. Layering Technique and Practical Tips: As photographers, we strive to recreate some of that experience that we had when we noticed something. We want to capture the essence of a moment. I'm sure I have heard it many times. It's all about capturing not how something looks like, but what it feels like. Layers in essence, breathe life into our images, awakening the viewer's curiosity and instantly drawing attention. It's a way to get close to that depth that we want to capture. There's no straight rules for this technique. If you understand the basic idea of composition we discussed last time, you're already on the right path. Your job now is to add more elements to your photos and find ways to make them work together. Now, while there's no specific rules, we want to give you some tips that will help you get results like the ones that we have shown you until now. A great way to make the layers in your photography shine is by using a wider ****. We suggest that you stick to something under 50 millimeters under Fuji cameras, we use 23 millimeters most of the time, which is the equivalent of a 35 millimeter ****. This is great to avoid distortion, but we also shoot a lot with the 24 millimeters, which is what we have on our phones. Try to stay away from zoom lenses for now. If you are using one of those, just leave it fixed on a wide setting. When you use a wide angle ****, your photos will include more of the same. This might mean you have to get closer to a subject to keep drawing the attention you want them. Don't be scared to get close. As you get closer and include more in your photo, your pictures will feel more real. It will be like the viewers is there with you. This is also a chance to include more than just one subject in your photo. Layering, combined with capturing movement, our energy will make your photo really stand out. Another thing that will happen when you shoot, why is that? More things will be in focus. This is important to consider. Basically, we are trying to do the opposite of the typical blur background portrait photos. We want to integrate the subjects with everything else in your photos. That is why having things in focus is something important. If you are new to photography, we suggest that you start experimenting in broad daylight with aperture at eight or something higher, since that will make understanding this technique a lot easier when we should with our phone because of the sensor size, we do not have to worry about this a lot way to lock focus on every camera model is different, but what you want to search is how to use back button focus for your specific model. This is not necessary, but super useful to avoid your camera hunting for focus with every snap. When you take pictures like this, you don't need to constantly worry about getting the focus just right. As long as you know about what distance your focus is set and the era it covers. One last thing that we have to tell you, which is a great reason to shoot layers with wide lenses, is because of **** compression. This has to do with the science or physics of our lenses. The longer the **** that you are shooting with, the more compressed our subjects and their background will appear. The opposite happens with wider lenses. Simply speaking, **** compression when shooting wide will help our composition by creating separation between our subjects. This separation allows us more freedom at the time of applying a better composition to our images, since it gives breathing space and makes our points of interest clear apart from one another. Now that we have discussed technical stuff, let's talk about some practical ideas. Taking layered shots in photography is about having the right mindset. You need to learn to say the potential insinuation or moments happening in front of you. You will start to see many elements and figure out how to include them all in one picture. Layering them in a way that looks good. If you do it right, it will add more depth and interest to your photo and make them look more powerful. If it's not done right, something will feel a little bit wrong. But making mistake is also a great way to learn. We will talk more about this in the next section, but before that, let's break this down a bit further. When you are overlapping multiple subjects, what you're looking at is not only position and balance, but you are also looking for clarity in your points of interest. By this I mean that there's nothing more frustrating for a viewer than to have the feeling of wanting to see something that is not there or maybe it's not clear. It just creates this confusing feeling and the viewer will never know what is he supposed to be paying attention to before taking a photo, it's always good to ask yourself, what is the point of interest of this photo? What caught your attention? People's eyes are naturally drawn to certain things in a picture. Like the brightest part a person's eyes. Things you put inside frame where lines lead to, like we talk about in our last section on composition, what you want to know is, where is your interest? And make that the foundation of your composition, whether it's an expression in the eyes of your subject or a moment or a thing, or the light or a background. Clean layers or placement of the elements should go together with this composition. Should not fight your intention. It should make it clear, even if the subject of your photo is something more abstract. Shapes or movement balance or energy. We want everything working together, not against one another. Keep it simple, pink. One thing to focus on, maybe it's a cool wall or a nice frame. As you notice a subject that you want to photograph, start to look at the background. Is it clean? How can you place your subject so that it doesn't go against the background? Then what else can you include in that picture? Sometimes you just have to go with your feeling. Don't wait for the perfect shot or you might miss it. Take a picture. When you say something interesting, you may be surprised by how the different parts of your picture interact. They can guide the viewer's eyes across the picture. Sometimes what's outside of the picture can make the viewer of your photo wonder about what they cannot see. This can make your picture really special. You cannot see everything inside a frame when you're shooting. You cannot always anticipate everything to be perfect. But that's part of the surprise and magic of this technique. The result is often more than what you saw. A lot of this is about following your feelings, that's why it's hard to teach. You have to learn it yourself by taking lots of pictures and try new things. Photographing layers is great for incorporating many different composition techniques or ideas, like shooting clean surfaces or reflections, or mirrors, shooting silhouettes, shooting through objects and through glass. I personally like to look for vertical lines that divide my frame and also create some visual separation. I mean, the possibilities are endless. But it all starts with this principle of trying to capture more than a single point of interest in our photos. Wow, that was allowed to cover. Yeah. You all start to make more sense the moment that you start to actually do it. Grab your camera, go outside, go hang around with your family, with friends, or go to the streets anywhere, look for layers, and go capture some interesting compositions. See you in the next lesson, where we will talk about cropping and some things to keep in mind when you are revisiting your work. 5. Learning by Cropping: All right, we have discussed about what to look for when we are shooting. We suggested settings and focal length, but now you should have already started to experiment shooting with all of this in mind. Now it is time to talk about after shooting in this class, the only type of editing we will talk about is cropping. If you know about photography, you know it's important to get things right when you take the photo. There's only so much you can fix later if you make mistakes with settings like exposure and focus. But if the composition feels a little off, you can still improve it by cropping. If you want to be a better photographer, it's not enough to try to always make the best photos, but also you need to think about how your photos could be improved. What I mean is that every small mistake can become a fantastic learning opportunity. Don't be afraid of making them or identifying them. Don't let it get you down. It doesn't mean that we're encouraging you to rely on heavy editing to fix things, but rather to notice that there's always room for improvement and doing things better. Because of that, we think that cropping can teach you a lot in the editing stage. With cropping, actually sometimes you can take your photos from good to great. Well, we do have to mention that cropping has been a topic of endless debate among photographers. Some say that it ruins the original artistic vision of the photographer, while others believe that it clarifies and enhances the intention that you had in the first place. Actually, many times, especially in a street photographer documentary setting, I photographed by intuition and feeling. But without knowing exactly what will I capture, I am okay with being surprised later when I look at my frames in the big screen and doing any adjustments that will make my discoveries clear at that stage. Our advice is if cropping makes your photo better, do it. Don't be afraid to try different crops to fund the best composition. Cropping is another way to understand balance and train your eye it. You are looking for those spots that we mentioned before. You are looking at the borders. You are looking at how the elements connect with one another. The direction where the subjects are looking at, all of that informs something to the viewer and you want it to make sense in your frame. It's also a good time to break the rules and maybe introduce some tension. Most professional camera give you enough resolution for some cropping without too much quality loss for social media posting online. You can even crop photos from your phone depending on the quality you will get from it. Of course, only if it's needed and if it will truly be making your photo better. Okay, now that we have talked composition techniques involved in layering, and how can we improve our images and learn about them by cropping. Let's close our class with some thoughts on ideas on how to use this for creating meaningful photos. And some things that you can continue doing to explore the complexity of layering in your photography. See you in the next lesson. 6. Closing Thoughts: We have reached the end of our class. We hope that you have learned some new ways to incorporate layers in your photos. I think layers really allow you to play around with composition and with the subjects of your images in a way that allows for a lot of creative freedom. Taking photos with layers in many ways means that you don't have to follow all of the traditional composition rules. You can be creative and try to fund the best balance in the middle of some busy moments. Don't be scared to take photos that look different, link into the moments that feel real and emotional, even if they're not perfect. I believe that using layers is a way not only to create photos with balance and energy, but also this allows you to find your own personal voice and vision as a photographer by practicing everything that we have discussed. You are exploring more about your interests in subjects, moments, style, or composition. After all, layers only work when all of these elements work together. Keep practicing this technique. If you want to even learn more of it, I highly suggest that you go on line and look for some masters in photography that uses this technique in their work. Some of my personal favorites are Alex Webb, Constantin Manos, Harry Guard, David Al, and Harvey. Study their photos and see what else you can learn from them. Just like real life photos don't have to be perfect. Some of the best photos show lives, imperfections. Don't be afraid of little messiness in your shots. Use layers to capture the beauty of the real world. Remember, the more you found your personal interest in your photos, the more meaningful images you will be creating. We are excited to see the photos that you will be submitting as part of the project for this class. Don't forget to let us know if you would like some feedback and share some thoughts about your creative process. Before we go, we want to say thank you for drawing this class. We will love it if you leave a review, if you think what you learned was useful and if you have any questions. There's also an area where you can leave some comments here, just write something there, and we will try our best to get back to you. Thank you so much for watching guys. We'll see you soon. See.