Photodoto | composition

Creating Blackgrounds

Black backgrounds add drama to many pictures. When you have a single subject, blackgrounds make it pop. They are particularly useful when you want to focus attention on one object, person, or animal.

Photography 101

Still life photography is the photography of inanimate objects purposefully arranged and lit. There's something very satisfying about capturing something exactly as you pictured it in your mind. The items themselves, their arrangement, lighting, and camera settings are all meticulously controlled to produce the desired result. Still life photography is [...]

Photography 101

Learning composition: foreground, middleground, background

In traditional landscape photography (or cityscape or seascape), photographers combine wide angle lenses with small apertures to achieve sharpness throughout an entire scene from the foreground to the background. This is in direct contrast to, say, portrait photography where the background is intentionally blurred. When looking at a photograph, the [...]

Photography 101

Learning composition: Leading the eye

Photo Friday is a weekly photography competition where everyone votes and the six entries with the most votes are chosen as "Noteworthy." I've written about leading the eye into a scene before but I thought last week's competition, The Road, illustrated the point very nicely. Of the six noteworthy photos, [...]

Photography 101

Learning composition: simplify, simplify, simplify

What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer. -- William Albert Allard, National Geographic Everything should be made as simple [...]