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Fantastic, you might think, the more feedback the better! Well, true, except that a lot of people calling themselves “serious hobbyists” or “beginning professionals” simply seek out the most positive feedback they can get and live in a world totally isolated from how completely awful their work really is. Paul Indigo asks a question on his blog, Beyond the Obvious: do photo enthusiasts really want to learn? In his article, Paul wonders about the true intentions of people who demonstrate fundamental misunderstanding of the art concepts of photography and blame it on insufficient equipment or software. If these people want to learn, shouldn’t they be more open to feedback?

Ed Zawadzki takes it a step further and asks whether the art of critique has fallen by the wayside to be replaced by the blind exchange of accolades. You can certainly see that happening a lot on some of the larger and less organized sites, such as DeviantART and even a bit on Flickr, though the overall intent of Flickr is much more casual, which deserves to be mentioned.

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A site like DeviantART, with its many thousands of self-proclaimed artistic users, has the capacity to act as the medium for an incalculable volume of helpful critique. The stage, however, was not set for that mode of discourse; DeviantART’s commenting system is used, by and large, for the distribution of praise, and there is no technological nor social pressure in place to counter that. After browsing the site for only a short while, you are given the impression that offering criticism is inadvisable, if not downright prohibited.

DeviantART follows in the footsteps of many other social applications which, in want of remaining neutral, offer no specific guidelines or technical hurdles to shape the course of conversation. It turns out that when people are presented with an enormous and varied selection of content, they choose only the things they like to make comments about. That’s fair enough, and it’s wonderful to receive copious plaudits as a creator—you might say that commendations grease the cogs of creation—but artists in search of higher plateaus, those truly interested in growth, need more. They need critique.

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That’s where PhotoSIG steps in. With a unique system of critique scoring (not to mention using the word “critique” in the first place), PhotoSIG is able to encourage its members to think critically, even if the feedback is completely positive. The number of photographs a user can post in a single day is limited, but additional postings can be earned by submitting “conforming” critiques, which simply means that the critique meets a 15-word minimum and is among the first three to be posted.

Critique authors are asked to follow these guidelines (snagged from the critique posting page):

• If you’re here to give someone a thumbs-down critique because that person gave you a thumbs-down critique, then erase your critique and cool off for a bit.
• A critique is not a judgment. Make your critiques helpful by suggesting ways in which the photographer can improve his or her photo. Don’t simply state whether you like the photo or dislike it.
• An unflattering critique can be very constructive, but you must take care to be as polite and respectful as possible. Ask yourself how you would feel if someone made the same comment about one of your own photos.
• Critique the photo, not the photographer or the other critics.
• If this photo already has a lot of critiques, then think about whether you have anything new to add. Instead of writing a “me too” critique, why not critique something else?
• The three thumbs-down rating should be reserved for photos that are clearly offensive or repugnant, not those that are merely bad. You may be asked to justify or revisit a three thumbs-down rating.

Those are what I would call guidelines to shape the course of conversation. By abiding by those very simple rules, a writer is sure to offer something of some use to the photographer. If the critique qualifies as “conforming” (as described up above), the photographer may rate the critique as “helpful,” which earns the writer extra points that he or she may use to upload additional photos and so on. If, however, the photographer rates the critique as “unhelpful,” the writer will lose points.

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This very straightforward point-based system creates an environment of open and honest communication among PhotoSIG’s users, and it is among the best systems out there right now. I don’t know if a site such as PhotoSIG exists for art of a non-photographic nature, but if one does not… Someone should create it.

Although it’s been some time since I’ve been active on PhotoSIG, you can nevertheless read some of my critiques of others’ work. If you have photos up on PhotoSIG and you’d like me to swing by and write you a critique, leave a comment below; I’d be glad to. Likewise, if you want to critique some of mine, be my guest.

It’s always interesting to get others’ views on a piece. Even if you don’t always get the most well-written, fluent, useful, spectacular critiques in the world, you cannot hope to learn if you do not participate.

In this, the third bite of our feast of art knowledge, I will talk about an elusive concept called positive and negative space. Traditionally, negative space is defined as the “empty” areas within an image. As you will soon see, even that which is empty can be very tangible.

Let’s start with the most classic demonstration of positive and negative space at work:

Immediately upon viewing this example, you come to realize that your mind has the capacity to create compositional elements from completely empty space. As an artist, you must understand this capability so that you can use it to your advantage. Now let’s try something a little bit different.

We generally see black as a “foreground” color and white as a “background” color, so your first impression of this picture might be that it’s a black jagged thing on a white background. Now take another look, but this time try to see it as a white jagged thing on a black background. With some concentration, you should be able to swap the fields back and forth as you look at it.

Just because a certain space within a composition is “the background” doesn’t mean it is devoid of form.

Now take a look at this funny looking person:

The figure on the left and the black field on the right are our positive space. The white area that surrounds the figure is the negative space, the “void” in the image. In a photograph, negative space is what you might casually perceive as the “juicy filling;” it surrounds your subject(s), it provides them with a place to be, but it is not itself a subject.

The moral here is simply this: do not neglect negative space because it isn’t the subject or focal point of your image. We can easily manipulate the viewpoint to make the negative space play a more dynamic role.

Here I have moved in closer so that the figure’s head touches the top of the frame, splitting the one large area of negative space into two smaller ones. This configuration gives the eye a lot more to play with. I don’t mean to say that this version is universally better than the first one, but it should demonstrate the power that negative space can wield over even a very simple composition.

Always keep negative space in mind when composing your frame; its shape is equally as important as that of your subject and your awareness of it will be immediately visible in your work.

I come from more of a fine art background; my parents both work in the arts and photography for me is an extension of my involvement in art as a whole. By talking about the fundamental concepts of art as they apply to photography I hope to help you improve your work and also understand the works of others.

Because this is only the second part in my Art Concepts series, I want to study the more general and fundamental stuff first. In the last episode, we looked at texture. Texture is a fairly specific element, so today I thought I would take a big step back and talk about composition.

When we say “composition,” we refer not only to the relative locations of the points of interest in a piece (which is the most discussed aspect), but also to their sizes, shapes, colors, and other variables that contribute to the balance (or imbalance) of the work. That’s what we’re going to look at today.

The Rule of Thirds

Photographers who are starting out and who begin exploring the generally available advice for creating interesting images will swiftly come across the rule of thirds. Most everyone who has spent any amount of time reading about photography, or art in general, is sure to have heard about the rule of thirds.

The rule of thirds says that the points of interest in a composition are most effectively placed at the intersections of a grid made up of two horizontal and two vertical lines, each equidistant from one another and from the edges of the piece.

More simply stated, the points of interest in the image ought to be roughly one third the total height or width of the image from any of its edges. This rule was created to help beginners shake the desire to place their subject smack in the center of the frame, which, generally speaking, is a boring thing to do.

As with all things in art, this rule can be broken. With experience, an artist will find situations where a centered subject is very pleasing to the eye, but not until he or she is aware of this rule can it be thoughtfully applied or violated.

Coincidentally, this was also mentioned recently on the Digital Photography School blog in a post entitled Break the Rule of Thirds. You may want to go read that to get an idea of why the rule of thirds can and should be broken on occasion.

More Advanced Principles

The rule of thirds is a simplistic rule, and a useful one for teaching composition fundamentals, but what I want to talk about are lesser-known principles of design that will help you bring even greater control and understanding to your compositions. These principles are:

1. Balance (or weight)
2. Scale
3. Isolation
4. Convergence

These principles are independent, though also related. You can think of them as a visual design toolbox with each tool having a specific use but each specific use being a necessary contributor to the final project. In this case, scale, isolation, and convergence are helpful in managing the emphasis in a piece, which is another principle of design. Of course, your goal as an artist is to communicate an idea or transmit an emotional response of some kind to your audience. Art that fails to do this is of limited value; even stock and documentary photography make use of these design concepts to communicate their messages effectively.

Balance

Compositional balance means maintaining a consistent “visual gravity” across the expanse of a piece so that the eye is not drawn to one side more than the other (for example). More often than not, exciting compositions are intentionally imbalanced, and you may already be creating compositions like that without knowing what fundamental principles you’re invoking.

By means of demonstration, I will use some simple graphics to illustrate the concept of balance. The reason I’m not using photographs to illustrate these design concepts is because I want to be sure your understanding of them is as “pure” as possible, and simple graphics allow me to single out these concepts. In this first example, the image is very clearly imbalanced.

Because the large, black dot is the only thing in the image, you are forced to look at it. Your eye does not want to hang around in that empty white space because it just isn’t interested in it. The feeling of having your eye drawn more toward one thing than another is what we mean by weight. Balance is achieved by placing elements of the same weight in roughly symmetrical areas of the composition. Let’s balance this composition out in the simplest way:

By placing an identical dot on the opposite side, we have achieved balance. Yes, it’s rather boring overall, but your eye happily moves back and forth between the two dots, exploring the expanse of the image without undue distraction. Try to get a feeling for what your eye gravitates toward. Try squinting, too (I’m serious).

It can help to squint or tilt your head when evaluating more complex images to get a feeling for the dynamics at play. Let’s make things more interesting by adding a different visual element to try to balance the first dot.

Here, the dot is countered by a line. If you are already used to looking at compositions and evaluating balance, or if you are very relaxed, you will notice immediately that the dot is still pulling all the weight of this image. Even though a visual element was placed on the opposite side of the piece, the dot still has more weight because it’s larger and because it extends toward the edges of the frame, asserting its dominance in a way.

To balance this composition, we’ll have to add more.

In this final example, you can see how much more visual weight the array of lines carries. Your eye is drawn back and forth naturally and balance is restored. The complexity of the lines overlapping one another makes them more interesting to look at than the dot, which increases their weight. There are several variables that contribute to visual weight in a composition and I want to talk about three specific ones right now: scale, isolation, and convergence.

Scale

Scale was really the star of the balance discussion above. As I said, there are many ways of changing the balance of a piece. Scale is the simplest to understand and control. Scale refers to the size of visual elements in relation to one another and to the composition as a whole.

In a photograph, scale is modified through perspective—by moving closer to or farther from an object. Keeping scale in mind when you compose your frame is just another way to manipulate the balance and therefore the visceral effect your image will have on its audience.

Isolation

When elements stand out from their surroundings, it’s called isolation. We can manipulate isolation in a composition in a couple of ways. First, we can alter the surroundings of an object, and second, we can change the relative scales of the object and its surroundings. Both will have an effect on how isolated an element in the composition will appear to be.

The first example is exploring contrast between visual elements and their surroundings.

Notice how the first element is easily recognizable, though the second element stands out much more strongly from its surroundings. We would say that the second element is more isolated than the first, which makes it a stronger focal point in the composition.

The second example shown below explores the effect of scale.

You will notice that both elements in this example draw your eye. The first is quite large and occupies a significant area of the frame, which gives it weight. The second is much smaller, yet your eye is drawn to it because of the space around it¹; because of its isolation.

Our minds process visual information spatially². When we view an image, we are subconsciously comparing its parts to what we know of the world, trying to recognize objects and relationships between them. When presented with a shape surrounded by a field of color, our mind creates a three-dimensional understanding of the space, visualizing the shape as sitting on a field of color. If two shapes are presented adjacent to one another and they are of different sizes, our subconscious reaction is that the larger shape is closer to us. Isolation works because our minds are so adept at interpreting shapes and the space around them.

You could say that photography, and even art itself, is based on shapes and the space around them.

Convergence

Convergence could be called the most obvious way to affect the emphasis of a composition. Essentially, convergence describes elements that come together at a point, though they don’t have to touch in order to be convergent. Taking advantage of the eye’s fondness for following lines, convergence can cause the viewer to trace a certain path through a composition.

Convergence can be executed very subtly in a photograph, but for the sake of illustration I will use it boldly here.

Notice how your eye catches one of those lines at the left side and “rides” it right up to the dot on the right. It’s very natural to follow lines within a composition and learning to recognize when and how that happens will help you to strengthen yours. The dots are the same size, but the one on the right draws more weight and attention because of the lines leading into it.

The Final Project

We’ve really talked about a lot here today and I commend you if you’ve actually read all the way through! After working on this post for nearly three weeks, I finally had to come to terms with the fact that I could never make it as complete as I’d like. I will try to include the parts I skimmed over or left out in future additions to this series. Suffice it to say, art is a very big subject to try to cover in a simple blog post.

Rather than post a bunch of photos here and try to describe what’s happening in them compositionally, I challenge you, my readers, to do so as you browse through photos in the next few days. I imagine most of you look at photographs daily, either yours or others’, and I would be ecstatic to hear about how you’ve applied these concepts to the creation of your own images or the critique of others’.

If you leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail with your thoughts and reactions, I will put together a “wrap-up” post sharing those ideas with everyone. If you’re looking for stuff to critique, feel free to hammer away at my gallery!

Other great sources include the amazing PhotoSIG, obviously Flickr, and all of the amazing galleries on photo.net. I frequent these sites when I’m in need of inspiration.

1. The space around it is called negative space, which I’ll be talking about in much more depth later
2. Though some people process what they see more spatially than others; we call those people “right-brained” because the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for spatial recognition

The goal of the rule (which is more of a guideline than a rule, actually) is to give you an idea of whether a photograph will come out blurry if you’re holding the camera in your hand. It is a somewhat simple formula to determine how various camera settings combine to compensate for camera shake. I use the rule constantly while I’m out shooting because I don’t like to bring a tripod to most places and there’s no use bringing home a whole CF card filled with blurry photographs.

Not only will I explain what this reciprocal rule is, but I’ll give you real examples of how to use it in the field.

The Reciprocal Rule

In its simplest terms, the rule states that you can safely handhold the camera if your shutter speed is faster than the reciprocal of your effective focal length. That may sound slightly daunting—and I guess that’s why people write articles about it—but it’s not a very hard thing to figure out in your head once you get the hang of it.

So first of all, what is a reciprocal? Everyone probably learned this in high school math, but as I was always quick to point out right before exams, who uses that stuff, anyway? A reciprocal is what you get when you flip a fraction upside down. Because every whole number is a fraction made up of itself over one (3 is the same as 3/1), the reciprocal of a whole number is one over that number. For example, the reciprocal of 60 is 1/60.

Before I get further into the math, let me start by explaining how I use the reciprocal rule. My preference is to stay in Av or Aperture Value mode basically all the time, so I choose an aperture and my camera will meter the scene and tell me what shutter speed it thinks I should be using to get a proper exposure. By manipulating my ISO sensitivity, aperture setting, and EV (Exposure Value), I can cause the metered shutter speed to become faster or slower.

The goal (while using this rule) is to manipulate the values you have control over until the shutter speed is faster than the reciprocal of your focal length. When figuring out your focal length remember these important caveats:

1. If you are using a zoom lens, your focal length depends on how far you are zoomed in. With a 24-70mm lens for example, your focal length could be anywhere between 24mm and 70mm. You can generally use the markings on the barrel of the lens to ballpark the current focal length; it doesn’t have to be perfect. If you want to round it to the nearest actual marking, round up to be safe.

1. If you are using a digital camera with a sensor smaller than full-frame (e.g. APS-C, etc.), which includes the Canon 10D, 20D, 30D, all of the Rebels, all Nikons, and basically every point-and-shoot camera on planet Earth, you need to multiply the current focal length of your lens by your camera’s multiplier to get the true effective focal length. As an example, the 10D has a 1.6x multiplier, so a 24mm lens on the 10D has an effective focal length of 24mm x 1.6 = 38.4mm. If you don’t know what your camera’s multiplier is, consult the manual, Digital Photography Review, or search Google.

I know I just made this “easy” guideline sound even more complicated, but as I mentioned before, it’s just a guideline. It might be easier to multiply by 1.5 and then just assume the answer is too slow by one stop, or take your best guess. There is no substitute for experience in this case.

Example

Here is a “real-world” example that will show you how the numbers are put together to give you an answer. I simulated these settings with my camera, so you can be sure that they’re pretty close, but as always, YMMV¹.

I am working with my 50mm f/1.4 lens on the 5D (which is full-frame), so my effective focal length is always 50mm. That should make it a bit easier to explain.

Using Av, or Aperture Value mode, I set my aperture to f/1.4. My ISO is 100. I meter the scene and the camera tells me I need a shutter speed of 1/8 second to get the proper exposure. 1/8 is much larger than the reciprocal of my focal length (which is 1/50, right?) so I need a faster shutter speed.

Opening the aperture would give me more light, but it’s already as far open as it can go. I have two choices:

1. Add more light to the scene.
2. Increase my ISO sensitivity.

In most cases it’s not possible to add more light to the scene when you’re shooting in the field, so my only choice is to increase the ISO sensitivity. I set it to 800. Again I meter the scene. Now my camera tells me I need a shutter speed of 1/60. 1/60 is faster than 1/50, so according to the reciprocal rule, it should be OK to expose this photo.

Bear in mind the following caveats:

1. If your subject is moving, the reciprocal rule doesn’t help you too much. While it does give a pretty good estimate of the shutter speed necessary to counteract the shake of your hands while holding the camera, it doesn’t tell you anything about the shutter speed necessary to freeze any given moving subject.

1. People with a lot of dexterity have been able to take incredibly crisp images of moving subjects at long focal lengths without tripods simply because they are like photographic snipers. I’ve never had good luck with that.

Image Stabilization (IS) and Vibration Reduction (VR)

Thanks to tukangmoto for reminding me about these features!

The two major camera manufacturers, Canon and Nikon, produce lenses with technology designed to help you with the specific problem of camera shake, which they call IS and VR, respectively. Other camera manufacturers, such as Olympus, Minolta, and Sony, have built this feature into their camera bodies as well.

I don’t know the specifics of the system outside of the Canon world, but Canon claims that using one of their IS lenses will allow your shutter speed to be two stops slower than this rule would tell you. When we say “stops,” we basically mean two notches down on your camera’s scale. With their latest generation IS, Canon claims that three stops should be possible, but as always, it’s better to play it safe, especially when using this rule, because it’s an estimate.

If you are using an IS- or VR-equipped camera or lens (with that feature turned on, of course!), you should be safe to achieve a shutter speed one stop slower than the rule tells you to. In other words, if the rule estimates 1/125th is fast enough, you can probably get by at 1/60th (each full stop in the shutter scale is about half as long or twice as long, depending on which direction you’re moving in; see the Tedious Explanation of the f/stop).

If you liked this article or have suggestions that might make it easier to understand, leave a comment! Happy shooting.

1. Your Mileage May Vary