so
hello and welcome to cheap joe's art stuff my name is julie and i'm here to impart some
knowledge to you today via a two-minute art tip and today's tip is actually about some
compositional fails that i want to talk about to help you avoid
in the future now what we're going to be doing is looking at like photo resources and how to like
not look at them exactly as absolutes you know like that those are not um
you know the end-all be-all of how things must be arranged when you are putting together a piece
for instance i have a photograph here and it's a very very delicate low contrast kind of intimate
photograph of a rose as you can see but there are some things about this that are good in my
opinion and also some things that are problematic okay one of the things that i like about this
is that you do have some interesting treatment of the edges which create some dynamic like negative
shapes so you have like this shape here where the the petals break the visual plane and stuff
like this and then you also have a really dynamic shape that is created you know around this edge
where you know the rose does not break the visual plane on this side so that's cool so
you have some really interesting stuff happening there because then you also have this shape
here now that's cool now in order to not make this look like a cutout you do have another kind
of visual element where you have this like glinty you know light in the back the problem with those
kinds of things are in this kind of context is because you have almost a complete lost edge with
the amount of light that's hitting the rose here and then also the light that's coming in you have
a very hard time picking out where this begins and ends and right here this kind of glinty prettiness
almost makes you lose the shape of the rose you kind of get lost in all this kind of stuff so this
thing is necessary i mean it's a nice extra shape that kind of breaks up the visual plane it breaks
up the background but it may be better utilized if it's moved a little bit so it's not directly in
contact with some of the petals you can maybe move it down here a little bit or change the direction
of this light because it's actually flooded with light you don't see a whole lot of shadows here
you can move this light source anywhere up here and still have this read correctly so
making sure that your light source isn't actually eating up your subject in something like this and
causing disturbances along you know the outside edge means that you don't have lost
edges of your major subject here and that can be a major benefit here's another one now i'm
not saying that this is bad i'm not because the photography is actually quite exceptional
compositionally there are some definite things that i would change in looking at this a couple
of things that i see generally like let's fold this in half let's look at this all right
so pretty much dude is kind of right in the middle when you're talking about subjects as prominent as
this being right in the middle not exactly that great so what would i do if i was looking at this
well i would kind of apply the rule of thirds and what i would do is move him in the picture plane
which way that's kind of up to you i kind of like this depth of field thing that's happening and
you have a lot of strong directional movement because of these two converging lines you know
converging planes that are pointing you directly towards the subject's face however that kind of
really really powerful strong convergence can be a little bit much so what i might do
is move him over just a little bit and so yes you haven't lost any bit
of the directional movement here but you have kind of moved him over so that there's a little
bit of a space for the viewer's eye to rest which is right here in this kind of softer area
i also would probably change some of these lost edges because this high key
light around his head kind of makes his hair look a little bit funny you know i'm not sure
if his hair looks like that or not or if it's just because of the way the light is is cast
around his face or not but this is creating a really really sharp line around his head
that you might want to look at a little bit differently because of the the shape that
it's creating so when you're looking at you know your visual reference and stuff always understand
that this is just sort of like a guidepost it's not the finish line and you can always adjust
and make your subject more prominent or less prominent and these other visual elements work
together in a little bit more harmony to make the visual interest a little bit more understandable
and clear so we hope that these little tips were helpful to you and hope that you enjoy
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