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Working on Your Composition

Lesson 29 from: SLR Lounge Live Q and A and Image Critique

Pye Jirsa

Working on Your Composition

Lesson 29 from: SLR Lounge Live Q and A and Image Critique

Pye Jirsa

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Lesson Info

29. Working on Your Composition

Lesson Info

Working on Your Composition

I have one final question and sort of bring it back around to the beginning of the day. We started with photo wanna one questions and the person says from the couple of photos I posted for critique the most rabbis him toe halves with composition. What recommended? What recommendations would you have for someone struggling with composition? And when you're shooting weddings and engagements, is it the same rules? Composition is one of those tricky things that I would say, I want to show you guys one thing, because my instagram, you guys can follow me if you like, um, composition, get away from what safe and the rule of thirds. There's so many beautiful things beyond the rule of thirds. There's, you know, symmetry and there's lines and leading lines, and there's their shapes and geometry that you can incorporate into all this kind of stuff. Just read and get outside of the basic compositions. Once you have understood, kind of like on. I say this after the point, like we talked about compo...

sition quite a bit for the course. I say this because once you get a good understanding of what does work, it's time to kind of practice outside of that, so you'll notice. Like when you see an instagram page like I shoot a lot of symmetrical stuff because I like symmetry in my shots. You'll find a lot of that. This is this is actually a wedding. That was this past weekend. I got permission to post a couple of these shots, but definitely nothing symmetrical or standard composition of this. This is a negative space competition, right where we basically used the emptiness of the frame to kind of create the shot. Um, I love using symmetry and like in conjunction with, like placing them low in the frame and having a lot of space to kind of leads into them. And you'll notice that, like the way that we shoot, we shoot so that the branches and everything kind of this shaft of light. Everything leads into them in the frame. And so when people think composition, they generally think of just placement in the frame, and they think of rules, right? But then composition is so much more than that. It's where you place the highlights in the scene like how do the highlights interact with where they're positioning is how does the lighting in the scene interact with the other objects in the scene? How do the colors coordinate together? Because color is another composition theory. So all these things fit into that big puzzle. And so if you can get outside of just where to frame them, you really open up a world of possibilities. I need to show this real quick. Uh, everybody, please get on my instagram account while we're in Vegas. We took a picture of my friend Thomas Ingersoll, and it's a poll on how deep you like your V. So this is a V neck. Um, this is part one. This is part two and part three and this is the clear winner right now with 78. So just feel free to leave a comment. Make it known how deep you like your be. Um, see, if there's any other compositional stuff in here, you'll see like that. Like this is very much that center weighted symmetry. We all have these kind of preferences, right? This is very much a mixture of different compositional theories we have, like if you look at the scene right here green versus blue, like there's ah, there's color composition in this job. Right where we have this beautiful blue in the background and we're incorporating the sunlit light onto the grass, there's actually another light that we're adding light to them. So this is that same technique that we're talking about when you're in a scene and it looks amazing, but we shoot it and it just like it falls flat. This is the literally same technique I was talking about. You guys should do on that shoot was you just add another light right here that boost them up so that we can keep everything a little bit darker and they pop. This was shown on a tripod so that all I do is I take one shot with the person standing here, one shot without and we just knock it out in photo shop. It's a 32nd literally a 32nd thing that we show in incredible engagements. So that's kind of Ah, again, here's another. This is negative space along with eyes that showing that weird thing so negative space, along with um light theory has no yellow and blue. There's a commentary colors, right? So again, I'm saying, Oh, I'm gonna go tungsten on this scene because I want my wall were actually shooting this in the middle today. This is one of the shots from and Carlin getting, wasn't it? Yeah, this is a shot from that. We wanted the wall to go blue. Wanted to have this neutral, like negative space. Look. And I was like, Hey, what's opposite of blue? On? The color wheel is yellow, which means that's a contrast in color that match. It's complimentary, so we use a yellow light on them, and it just you're focused just right into the frame. Cool lutely. Cool. Five. What a day. Really fun day, um, wanted to make sure everybody would run out of time for now. Thank you all for being here with us in our studio audience and thank you to everyone for all of your fantastic questions that came in throughout the day. So, pie, before we go out, where can people find you? Follow you talk a little bit about that Facebook group again and let us know how to follow up. Sure. Join us in the Facebook group again. Just go to Facebook. It's We have a lot of that like the Facebook page, which is this page right here. But where the action is is in the photography community. So just type in as her land photography community. We have, Ah, great community there. It's always positive, always great people that are willing to help each other. If they're not, they're out of there and then s Heartland dot com. We have a lot of really cool things that works, including an awesome new subscription feature that opens up Mawr interactive education possibilities on and that's really it. Feel free to follow me on Facebook on Instagram, I think has already know where to find me. And I guess it's until our next time until our next time pie, That's a wrap. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, pie.

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Pye is an awesome instructor! He explains everything in a way that you understand it. He is a wealth of information. Love all of his classes!! I love Creativelive and SLR Lounge! Continue doing the great work that you do!!

fbuser a48cf323
 

Pye is an amazing teacher! I've learned so much from him over the years - both in person and through his tutorials. What's even more amazing is that he is able to do it LIVE! He is able to clearly explain complicated concepts through easy to understand lessons. I highly recommend his courses to learn everything from the basics to advanced topics!

user-592217
 

Wow! Pye is an awesome instructor! I've learned SO many things - nuggets of gold!

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