I may be slow, but I'm learning...

. . .
A kind soul on Urban Exploration Resource clued me in to the 'rule of thirds', which says that if you locate a central feature of your photo on one of the crosses on a grid like the one below, your photo will be much more interesting than if you just center it.



He tells me that 99.99% of the time, he doesn't crop his photos--he composes them properly when he takes the picture--but since the Semel Smokestack photo I took already existed, I decided to play with it to see if just following that rule would actually improve the photo. Below is what I came up with:


The original is in the post dated March 31. You can judge for yourself, but I think this one is better. So now, when I'm editing my pictures in Photoshop, I copy the grid above and paste it on the photo to see if a central feature does indeed fall on one of the crosses. Someday I may learn to compose them a bit better, but for now cropping will have to do.

Some I seem to have composed well by instinct or accident. In my next post I'll post a photo of crocuses that is obviously 'photoshopped', but which more or less followed the rule when I shot it.

I need a small book on the basics of photo composition, I think. The trouble is, there aren't any such books, that I can find, anyway. They're all huge and either hopelessly complicated or too simplistic (one said, if the sun comes out suddenly after a rain, look for a rainbow because they make good pictures), and all of them contain things that are not pertinent. I don't want all the technical details; I just want to learn how to take a decent, reasonably aesthetically pleasing photo.

One of the guys at UER said my photos were okay...just don't go around calling myself a photographer. A woman wrote in to ask what his definition of 'photographer' was--and was it from a regular dictionary or the Holier-Than-Thou dictionary? Seems to me that a person who takes photographs is...well, you know.

After I post my crocus thing on eBay, I'll put it up here. You're welcome to click on the link on the left to my eBay auctions...and of course, to purchase it, if you like :>) I come cheap.

May