Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I. Layout (Geometry) & Composition – 14 slides Don’t center the subject & fill the frame! Copyright © 2003 – 2009 Kenji Tachibana

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Layout (Geometry) and Composition G olden Rule: Don’t frame-center the subject This sound obvious and easy to do. Although, in the heat of the moment, many students do exactly that. The difficulty can be attributed to the dead-center position of the focus [ ] Bracket. Learn to use the center-position focus bracket combined with Focus-Lock & Recompose method. Read about focus-lock and other ways of setting up the focus bracket in your camera manual. Camera frame

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Layout (Geometry) and Composition F ocus Bracket: Types  Spot [ ] focus bracket  Center-position default [ ] focus bracket. Use it in conjunction with the3 focus lock.  Sony’s special super wide [ ] focus bracket. It works very well using the hyper focal distance idea.  Computerized multi-bracket and multi-position focus brackets. Avoid this until later…  Special custom-position focus bracket. Very good for composition control. Reading about the other focus method options can help you to better use the simple ‘default’ focus bracket.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Layout (Geometry) and Composition F ocus Lock & Reframe: Position the focus bracket [ ] on the subject, press the shutter button half-way down to ‘lock’ the focus and exposure. Then reframe for composition to fit your story or the tight-layout. Tight Layout is something that I usually provide based on your camera original image… Camera original /w Tight layoutSuccessful Re-shoot

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Layout (Geometry) and Composition on AF /AE Lock: Default I like to use it in the default mode where both the focus and exposure are locked when the shutter button is pressed halfway down. Take it off the default mode by pressing on the AF/AE LOCK button. Most DSLR cameras allows for another option which is to control the AF and AE functions separately. This is a perfect topic to look up in your camera manual or dpreview.com/ Glossary.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Layout (Geometry) and Composition R ule-of-Thirds: Place your focal point on any of the 4 letter positions. The A-B-C-D positions are based on the western culture preference for the top left corner as the starting point.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Layout (Geometry) and Composition R ule-of-Thirds: Camera display option Many better compact digital and most DSLR cameras have a rule-of-thirds ‘grid’ as one of the camera Display options. It can be toggled On/Off as need arises. It is also a very handy thing to use for leveling image horizon lines. It works much better than the levels built into some tripods

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Layout (Geometry) and Composition D isplay Options: Do you have  Full screen info  Partial screen info  Exposure Histogram  Composition grid  Clear screen & others Study your camera manual about your camera Display Options. My camera manual illustration above shows a confusing array of information which can be displayed on your screen. Check out your camera manual and camera Display options now…

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Layout (Geometry) and Composition Y es It Matters: The more you know about the meaning of what’s displayed on your camera LCD, the better your chances are of getting what you want. And of not being disappointed after-the-fact. Re-shooting is usually not available to most people. So, it is to your big benefit to know what your camera is doing, or even not doing…

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Layout (Geometry) and Composition S imple Solution: Take the easy way Start off by using your camera on its snap shot AUTO mode. This usually gives you a clear screen turning off most of the camera LCD feedback. This gives you the chance to concentrate on seeing the composition and help you capture the decisive moment.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Layout (Geometry) and Composition E asy Next Steps: Use Auto-P Once you have used your camera enough to feel confidence in your camera to deliver the image, it is time for you to move on to the next stage. Set your camera to Auto-P. Sometimes this is marked only as ‘P’. All self portrait assignment images must be taken with the camera set to Auto-P.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Layout (Geometry) and Composition T echnical Issues: Listed in order of practical importance but they are pretty much all important. Most of this information can be seen in one of more of the camera Display option settings. 1.Shutter speed – a fraction number. 2.Aperture – lens opening (f/stop) 3.ISO – limit to 100. DSLR user can use faster ISO’s up to 200, 400 or even Flash – make sure it is OFF. 5.Digital zoom – make sure it is never used. 6.IS – make sure the image stabilization is turned ON to the ‘shooting only’ mode.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Layout (Geometry) and Composition O ptical Center: If your story requires a frame- centered subject or focal point, the minimum camera movement is to point it down slightly to raise the subject up to the optical center marked by the x in the illustration. Optical Center X

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Layout (Geometry) and Composition G eometry: It’s about shapes Camera frame is a rectangle. A rectangle can be near-square or very wide like a 35 mm frame. Shapes often associated with composition is an ellipse, triangle, and letter forms such as an ‘S’. The triangle can easily represent a cat or even a persons face. And that face can wide or narrow; upside down or right side up; shown full or cropped; shown alone or echoed…

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I x End