Composition

Camera Obscura

Camera obscura is a box that projects a picture of its surroundings on a screen or other surface, it is used in drawing and for entertainment, and it is also one of the inventions that led to photography, and the camera.

The device is usually a box or a room with a hole in the side to let light through, light passes through this hole and hits a surface inside and is reproduced upside-down, but with colour and perpective preserved.
The projection can be put onto a peice of paper or other convas and be traced to get a very accurate representation.
Using mirrors, it is possible to project a right side up version of your image, and a more portable version was a box with an angled mirror projecting onto tracing paper placed on the glass top, the image being upright as veiwed from the back. As the pinhole is made smaller the image gets sharper, but the projected picture becomes dimmer, however if the hole is made too small the sharpeness is made worse due to diffraction.

Rule of Thirds

The rule of thirds is a guideline to be used when composing visual images like photos paintings and other designs, the guideline dictates that when taking a picture for example, you should imagine the picture as being split up into 9 equal parts, using two equally spaced horizontal lines, and two vertical, and then having the important elements of the picture to be placed along these lines or where they cross, it's said that placing your subjec matter along these lines makes the picture more interesting createing more tension and energy than simply placing them in the middle would.

For example,the picture of this adorable puppy below helps to demonstraight this point, as the puppy sits on the right line of this picture, also hitting two points where the lines cross facing to the left, this is often refered to as a power point, or a crash point. Also, the grass also sits on the lower horizontal line, as above that line the grass becomes out of focus, this helps split up the picture more.

 

 

 

 

Fibonacci Sequence

 

The Fibonacci Sequence, also known as The Golden Mean, is a sequence of numbers (duh), named after Leonardo Fibonacci, who made them noticed to the world in the thirteenth century.

Sometimes starting with 0 or 1, the sequence is made up by adding the last two numbers of the sequence together, so for example, if your started with 1, you would then get 1, then 2, then 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and this continues indefinately.

 

 

The way this is applied to photography is similar to the rule of thirds, in the rule of thirds you split the picture up into 3 equal sections, but with use of the fibonacci sequence, making what is also known as the golden ratio (which is 1:1.618...) you split the picture up into 3 unequal sections, 1:6.18:1, then you use the resulting lines and intersections to compose the picture.

 

 

The second method is more complicated, but also much more interesting to look at, this uses something called the golden rectangle, a golden rectangle is a rectangle where the sides are related to phi, but when you unhitch the length from its connections with the width, then swing it round the create a new length, you also get a goldren rectangle. If you continue to do this, then draw a curve from the corresponding corners of each square, you'll get a fibbonacci curve, which looks like this below.

To apply this to a picture you may want to create, simply place the subject matter at the centre of the spiral, and you will get what many artists like to call a natrually well composed picture.