picture composing

Today is a lovely cold wet wintery day out and so i thought id spend a bit of time practising composing shots indoors. I have a new book called Photo Idea Index (Jim Krause), and it says "Effective composition gives the eye a comfortable visual environment for exploration - free of pointless obstruction, dead ends and misleading directional cues".

Oh but then it goes on to say "if you feel that you are currently lacking in this type of artistic sensibility, dont be discouraged: apply what you know and strive to expand your awareness of effective composition with every picture you take". Phew, thats me....lacking artistic sensibility.

So anyhow searching for ideas to play with i gazed at my jewellery hanging on the wall and thought 'perfect'.

So thinking about the 'visual environment for exploration' concept i kinda tangled a heap of beads together.

Then i was trying to compose some shots that avoided having things centred and mathmatical. This is something im not so flash at as i have quite a science brain and so lopsidedness / unevenness is torture to my head. So anyhow, here we go with an attempt at keeping things out of centre (vertically and horizontally).

Then i tried using the camera at odd angles to create further variety, although i stuffed up the background with the wedge of wall in the top right, doooop.


And then lastly, and i actually kinda like this one. Originally i just cropped it down and kept the rings horizontally centred but then had another play and came up with this. So am happy to finish the day with my skew-wiff ring stack, despite the fact the focussing is a bit off.