102 — Layering images with interesting elements

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #102 dis­cusses lay­er­ing your pho­tographs with inter­est­ing ele­ments. This involves seri­ous atten­tion to the over­all com­po­si­tion of every frame that you take.
If you are tak­ing a shot of a moun­tain for exam­ple, there’s always more to the shot than just the moun­tain. When you are aware of what’s around the moun­tain and take the time to “layer” the image with inter­est­ing ele­ments, the com­po­si­tion as a whole gets much stronger. We also touch on how to refine those “lay­ered ele­ments” in post processing.

Athabaska River Reflect­ing Pools at Sun­rise by Marko Kulik — Banff National Park — Alberta, Canada. As you can see this shot is about more than just the moun­tain which is in the back­ground. The fore­ground, midground and back­ground “lay­ered” ele­ments all con­tribute to the over­all com­po­si­tion in this scene.

Some­times you feel like a nut — Image by Lisa Could­well. Even scenes using larger aper­tures ben­e­fit from “lay­ered ele­ments”. Here, Lisa focuses on the nut medal­lion but the tire in the back­ground is a repeat­ing shape that adds inter­est to the image. The diag­o­nal lines in the image help to guide your eye. The com­po­si­tion here is very deliberate.

Links /resources men­tioned in this pod­cast:
– Improv­ing bor­ing land­scapes
- Images that com­pli­ment SONG titles or Book titles is our reg­u­lar forum assign­ment for Novem­ber
– Inten­tional cam­era move­ment  is our level 2 assign­ment for November

If you liked this pod­cast and want to review it on Itunes, this link gets you to the main page

If you are inter­ested in writ­ing for our blog please con­tact me photography.ca (   A   T  ) G m ail  Dot co m (using stan­dard email formatting)

Please join the Photography.ca fan page on Facebook

My Face­book pro­file — Feel free to “friend” me — please just men­tion Photography.ca
My Twit­ter page — I will fol­low you if you fol­low me — Let’s con­nect — PLEASE email me and tell me who you are in case I don’t rec­i­p­ro­cate because I think you are a spammer.

If you are still lurk­ing on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly  Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

Thanks to Scorpio_e, Melissa Dorner, Josh G, Math­ias,  Avi­tal Pin­nick, Henry. b, and Jill bayer who posted  blog com­ments about our last pod­cast. Thanks as always to every­one that sent com­ments by email about our last pod­cast. Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Thanks as well to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board. Most of the links to actual the prod­ucts are affil­i­ate links that help sup­port this site. Thanks in advance if you pur­chase through those links.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. |Sub­scribe with iTunes|Sub­scribe via RSS feed |Sub­scribe with Google Reader|Sub­scribe for free to the Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast — Photography.ca and get all the posts/podcasts by Email
You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.

Thanks for lis­ten­ing and keep on shooting!

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow | Down­load