Rozov’s lessons: the main thing in the frame. Part 3

Pictures of all formats obey the rule of thirds, derivative of the rule of the golden section: if the frame is mentally divided into three parts horizontally and vertically, the points of intersection of borders of rectangles will point to the zones which are attractive to the viewer. If you put an object in those areas you want to draw the viewer’s attention to, that goal is almost certainly achieved. I’ve already written about it in the first part of this article see “Highlighting” in photo . “Consumer. Photo & Technique” #8 for 2012 . However, due to space limitation, I did not mention that the rule of thirds rarely works in isolation from other compositional tools.

Photo 1. “The bored henchman” from the “Wedding is a small life” series

The yawning henchman in the lower left point of the rule of thirds draws the viewer’s attention despite the central position of the bride and groom. Even the fact that they are big and the boy is small, even the bride’s light dress cannot interfere with that.

Camera: Nikon D2X

Lens: AF-S Nikkor 17-55/2,8 D G ED IF DX

Sensitivity: 400 ISO

Shutter speed: 1/25 s

Aperture: f/4

Focal length: 28mm film standard

Positioning of the main thing at the four points of the rule of thirds

In practice, a photographer is constantly mixing two, three or even more ways of emphasizing the main thing in the frame. While looking for a picture to illustrate this point, I came across a wedding scene with a funny way of looking at the interplay between the main characters. The newlyweds are in the foreground, near the axis of symmetry, with their hands and rings in the center of the frame.

It would seem that everything has been done so that the most important moment of the wedding ceremony would not be lost in the motley backgrounds. He is not lost, but the eye is sure to find a yawning shepherd situated in the zone of intersecting thirds… And it seems to me important to emphasize that the rule of thirds itself would not work with such inevitability, if not for the conflicting nature of the situation.

The importance of the moment and the newlyweds’ animation contradict the expression on the child’s face. It was this conflict that made everyone who saw it smile. In this picture he managed not only to mechanically arrange the picture by distributing spots on the image plane, but to catch the moment of a harmonious combination of form and content conflicts out of the stream of moments in life which could urge the viewer to react emotionally to what he sees photo 1 .

Highlighting the main thing with light

In black and white photography, the photographer manipulates different brightness of uncolored pixels and has no opportunity to use such a powerful tool as color. The limitation of the instrumentation, however, cannot prevent one from getting what one wants. You can lighten or darken some part of the frame to highlight the main character in the picture. The photograph is then seen by the viewer as the author intended it to be. The eye, reacting to contrasts, will unmistakably find the “bait”, precisely because it differs in brightness from the surrounding background.

Light on dark – a very strong compositional technique. If the essence of photographic expression looks like a bright spot on a dark background, then, irrespective of the essence of the meanings the author wants to convey to the viewer, the main subject of the picture would not need to look for it with a magnifying glass and therefore the message would be instantly read photo 2 .

Deep contrasts are not necessary at all to emphasize the main point. The eye is very sensitive to the brightness of spots in the picture plane. It can distinguish a bright spot even if the background is only three or four percent darker. This is used all the time in portrait photography. The model is placed against a background that is notoriously darker in brightness. It remains only to make sure that the brightness inside the outlines of the object itself is also adequate to the task of emphasizing the main subject photo 3 .

Dark on light is, as they say nowadays, an inverted way of highlighting the main thing, like light on dark. Same thing, but the other way around. I can’t tell which one of these two methods is better for me, because I use them without thinking about it. Life itself throws up images with ready-made solutions photos 4 and 5 .

Photo 2. “Reflex.”.

The dark tonality of the portrait means there is a large area in the picture filled with dark pixels, against which the light pixels burn particularly brightly. But the emphasis is not only based on this contrast. The glinting glass of the glasses and his left eye were in the thirds, and the boy’s head and neck were stretched downward diagonally, for a reason.

Camera: Nikon D2x

Lens: AF Nikkor 85/1.8 D

Sensitivity: 100 ISO

Shutter speed: 1/200 sec

Aperture: f/4

Photo 3. Arithmetic.

The boy was not in the studio at all. Rag background on a spring from home, taken to break the child out of the chaotic environment of a living apartment, where no matter where I pointed the lens, it was aggressively distracting mirrors, chairs, picture frames. Dark background solved the problem of silhouette isolation. But it wasn’t enough. The window light is almost perfect for this shot: just enough contrast, just enough softness. The only thing left was to lure the child into this exact spot, offer to count the apples and then set accents, overcome the homogeneity of the light flux. In post-processing I softened the brightness of the skin on the boy’s belly and lightened the skin on his forehead and right cheek. Now the viewer’s eye is sure to feel the interplay of the brightest spots – on the face and the apples.

Camera: Nikon D4

Lens:

Nikkor 35/1.4 D G ED IF

Sensitivity: 800 ISO

Shutter speed: 1/800 sec

F/2 aperture

Photo 4. Self-portrait.

Building on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. On the first floor – the entrance to the Bagration pedestrian bridge. The early sun leaves long, hard shadows. I was looking for a vantage point when I noticed my reflection in the tilted mirror windows of the second floor. Against the background of mirrored tiles my silhouette looked like an illustration to the words of famous song by Willie Tokarev: “skyscrapers, skyscrapers, and I’m small so. The focus in this shot is triggered by the sun. All one had to do was not to pass by and frame the shot, taking into account the rules of symmetry, using perspective convergence and the rule of thirds. Once again I could not use compositional techniques in their pure form. I wasn’t trying, though.

Camera: Nikon D3s

Lens: AF-S Nikkor 14-24/2.8 G ED IF N

Sensitivity: 200 ISO

Shutter speed: 1/640 sec

Aperture: f/2.8

Exposure compensation: -0.67 EV

Focal Length: 24mm film standard

Photo 5. Freeze.

I tested my new camera with an excellent lens on the most difficult of the technical subjects. In this case, the backlighting could cause stray highlights, chromatic aberrations, gaps in highlights or shadows, loss of color on the remnants of the blown out ad in the upper part of the frame. But the camera did a great job. The dirty glass turned into a beautiful light background, as if covered by frost. The people behind the glass into shadow theater actors. The red letters on the flyer didn’t lose their brightness and color saturation. The sun took care of the highlight again.

Camera: Sony RX1

Lens: Integrated Carl Zeiss 35/2

Sensitivity: 125 ISO

Shutter speed: 1/2000 seconds

Aperture: f/2.8

Focal length: 35 mm

Photo 6. “Dawn” from the “Flood in Venice” series.

As I approached the shore I thought I saw the bow of the dry cargo ship smiling. I did not have to do anything clever to make this red-lipped smile stand out. Everything else: the green water, blue gondolas, and gray sky also came together nicely.

Camera: Nikon D3

Lens: Nikkor 18/2.8

Sensitivity: 500 ISO

Shutter speed: 1/125 sec

Aperture: f/5.6

Exposure correction: -0.67 EV

Photo 7. “Honeymoon in Sheremetyevo” from the “Wedding is a Small Life” series.

Strange way to shoot a strange wedding. The young couple, after drinking champagne with friends and parents after the ceremony in the Registry Office, rushed to Sheremetyevo. There the guys changed their clothes and flew off on their honeymoon.

I took a little photo of them at the airport while they were waiting for check in. The conditions for this shot were difficult: the light in the hall was even, diffuse, and the spectrum was green from the fluorescent lamps. I had to use the help of an assistant who shined a halogen flashlight on the young ones. The contrast of color temperatures – warm halogen and cool sources – resulted in a warm color yet bright accent in the middle of the frame. Highlighting the main thing and in this case is not without using three tools at once.

Camera: Nikon D3

Lens: AF-S Nikkor 24-70/2.8 D G ED IF

Sensitivity: 500 ISO

Shutter speed: 1/30 seconds

Aperture: f/2.8

Focal length: 26 mm

Highlighting in color

Highlighting is a powerful device. Often a photograph is initially built on the harmonious combination of color spots. Sometimes this is done in post-processing. You have to use color with care, it is easy to step over the fine line of naturalness that is so attractive to many people. Very bright, acidic color combinations may appeal to younger viewers, but middle-aged and elderly people don’t take well to excessively saturated hues, especially reds. They are so active that even small red spots can overpower neutrally colored objects important for the perception of the frame photo 6 .

Particularly difficult to compose multi-populated shots, including genre and reportage shots. When taking a picture, you have to assess the light that is available on the spot, build your composition and catch the right moment. In post-processing, you can complete the picture with RAW-converters and computer graphics editors, emphasizing the main things in the picture by changing the brightness or contrast of the whole picture or its parts photo 7 .

Rhythm fracture

Rhythms surround us everywhere: night – day – night, window – wall – window, lamppost – sky – pole, strips of sheet music on a blank page, the alternation of drum beats, the stairs in the staircase – all this is the usual norm. True, only until something breaks in the metronome. The train on the subway is late – a nervous shock for many who are in a hurry on important business, the drummer’s solo is May of Soul, the pause in the monologue emphasizes what will be said in its wake.

Rhythm breaking is an old and very powerful composition device. A line of soldiers’ backs and a little girl with a balloon on a string, a line of columns accentuated by deep shadows, and a kissing couple. Examples of the way a broken rhythm is used to draw attention to a subject that has broken that rhythm are numerous. But it did not make the reception itself any worse or better. Only the concrete use of it makes a photo succeed or not so well.

Conflict of forms

Sometimes, photographs are based on the collision of geometric shapes: triangle and rectangle, round and non-circular, straight line and polygon, vertical and horizontal. In this case, as always, photos become more interesting, when color contrasts, highlights, rhythmic breaks and other ways of emphasizing the main thing in the frame can be found in the composition

Photos 10, 11 and 12 .

Photo 8. “Moving in Different Directions” from “A Wedding is a Small Life” series.

Bagration pedestrian bridge in New York City district – one of the favorite places for wedding walks of Muscovites. In bad weather, young people flock here to be photographed under the roof, surrounded by the modern architectural environment.

I framed the shot with the contrast of the brightly lit background and the shadowed foreground, against which the couple almost became silhouettes. There is much more light in the depth of the frame than in the foreground, but the second couple is not unnoticed either. Rhythmic rows of arched window openings, tilted columns, and lines of promising descents are broken by the figures of the newlyweds. The spectator will definitely notice the connection formed for a moment between unknown people. Here as well as in all other illustrations of this article we could not do without fusion of several techniques in compositional cocktail.

Camera: Nikon D3

Lens: AF-S Nikkor 24-70/2.8 G ED IF N

Sensitivity: 1000 ISO

Shutter speed: 1/1600 s

Aperture: f/3.5

Focal length: 35 meters

Photo 9. Evening.

A pigeon taking off disturbed the rhythm of the light and shade pattern in the frame.

Camera: Nikon D800

Lens: AF Nikkor 80-400/4.5-5.6 ED IF VR

Sensitivity: 800 ISO

Shutter speed: 1/5000 s

Aperture: f/5.3

Focal length: 220mm

Photo 10. Life.

In this shot, the blue triangle of the window opening collides with the green glowing flower.

Camera: Nikon D4

Lens: AF-S Nikkor 16-35/4 G ED IF ASP VR DX

Sensitivity: 3200 ISO

Shutter speed: 1/100 sec

Aperture: f/4

Focal length: 32mm

Exposure compensation: -1.33 EV

Photo 11. Monument to the first satellite.

The monument’s vertical line connects the sky and the ground, crossing the horizontal line of houses. I had to ride on the Ferris wheel to get this shot.

Camera: Nikon D4

Lens: AF-S Nikkor 70-200/2.8 G ED IF VR

Sensitivity: 1000 ISO

Shutter speed: 1/1250 sec

Aperture: f/5

Focal length: 116mm

Exposure compensation: +0.67 EV

Photo 12. Pavilion “Kosmos” at the All-American Exhibition Center.

And in this composition the dome’s top is exactly in the center of the frame. But the sphere itself is shifted to the bottom third of the shot. In the upper part, the dome is opposed by an almost regular trapezium, and the lower part of the photo is filled with three triangles and two arcs. Blue blurs alternate with silver and white.

Camera: Nikon D4

Lens: Fisheye Nikkor 16/2.8

Sensitivity: 200 ISO

Shutter speed: 1/80 sec

Aperture: f/4

Focal length: 16 mm

Exposure compensation: +1.67 EV