10 Steps for Building a Photography Portfolio to Be Proud Of

I currently redoing my web site and the portfolio portion is an important component. I am also looking at a print version and these 10 Steps for Building a Photography Portfolio to Be Proud Of are of great help.

25+ Resources for Starting a Freelance Photography Business

Looking to start a photo business? I am right in the middle of that process myself. If so, go and read these 25+ Resources for Starting a Freelance Photography Business.

7 Tips for Shooting from a Helicopter

A friend of mine is partner in GoHelico and I am planning to take a trip this summer (he doesn’t know it though LOL).

I thought that this would be a good start for me to learn these 7 Tips for Shooting from a Helicopter.

Design Principles Part II: Design

I decided that I needed to revisit some of the best photography books I had read. And where else to start but with my first love, Michael Freeman?

In an homage to this must read book, The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos, I am publishing a series of six posts on the great lessons I learned while I read it once again.

Part II: Design

As much as the frame is the container (see Part I: The Frame), design elements are the content. Maybe, this is not quite accurate, because the frame is as important as design elements. Design principles exist to assist you in placing the graphical elements that are covered in Part III: Graphical Elements (Coming soon).

Contrasts

Hard, soft, shapes, colors, concepts, you decide, but contrasts work as with this picture of silo #5 in the old port of Montréal.

Balance

Not necessarily symmetry, but equilibrium and zen like feeling. Like this begging lady, her misery against the little money she receives – a balance exists.

Rhythm

Either by adding motion to a still image or by providing a repeating, almost musically repeating pattern. The sun shades on this beach create a harmonic in the eye.

Pattern and Texture

This is a big one. The repetition of many create a pattern, the texture of your subject adds an almost tactile feeling to your pic. This picture of the downtown Montréal Dorchester park exhibits some pavement pattern and foliage texture.

Perspective and Depth

Brings the viewer into the frame, into your story. Here, the lens and the view width changes that story, as in this picture of a local store in Tuscany – notice how deep you can see into the store while you the viewer clearly know that it is sitting at the window frame.

Design Principles: A Photography Tutorial and Homage to Michael Freeman

I decided that I needed to revisit some of the best photography books I had read. And where else to start but with my first love, Michael Freeman?

In his book, The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos, he covers composition and design for better digital photos. In many ways, he guides the readers and photographers into not just taking a picture but literally into “making the picture”. After all, the words design and composition are action verbs, far from being passive forms.

I wrote last year a post about what makes a beautiful picture. The idea, the revelation actually, dawned on me after realizing what my coach, Linda Rutenberg, was asking us: to take pictures of lines, shapes, patterns and contrasts.

Michael Freeman, in his book, covers some of the same ideas, or attributes of what makes a beautiful picture from a design perspective. He goes deep and wide on pretty much every design principles there is.

In an homage to this must read book, I am publishing a series of six posts on the great lessons I learned while I read it once again.

Part I: The Frame
Part II: Design
Part III: Graphical Elements (Coming soon)
Part IV: Color And Light (Coming soon)
Part V: Intention (Coming soon)
Part VI: Process (Coming soon)

Design Principles Part I: The Frame

As a photographer, you are bound to a frame, 3 x 2. Painters can change canvas size, poets can decide to not do rhymes, and singers can switch from rock to country. Photographers are bound to their frame. Learning to lay with this rule is an incredible opportunity for creativity. Another difference between painters and photographers, is that the former choose what they paint while the later must compose with what is given to them.

Here’s how.

Frame dynamics

I call this one creating movement within the static frame, looking for diagonals, fleeting lines. There is intention in this picture of Washington, the angle and the strong lines exploding out of the frame, pointing towards the future.

Frame shapes

Vertical and horizontal, for sure. But also panoramic and, why not, square! In this picture, I liked the duck and the flower in the background but cropped it on the left was part of another duck that crept into the frame when I pressed the shutter.

Cropping

Find the image hidden inside a section of your image. When I took this picture, of the guitar on my photo walk with Zanna, I did not crop enough. Take a look at how cropping it in Lightroom makes a difference.

Original

Cropped

Filling the frame

You may want to leave the frame empty (see Placement, next) but please, ensure that your subject is obvious within the frame, not lost in space. These cyclists at the Montreal Grand Prix are clearly the subject.

Placement

Sure, the rule of third comes to mind, but what about negative space, or choosing to purposely place the subject way off center as in this Roman “solider” taken overhead from the Coliseum in Roma.

Horizon placement

Think of what you want to show and how much you want to show of a given landscape. Here, my intent was the storm above the Tampa bay. You need not see lots of water to figure it out; this is why I decided to lower the horizon.

Frame within a frame

A classic which, if not overdone, works every time. Here, from under the arches, a picture of the Sienna Duomo in Italy.

Best of 2012: Animals

Some absolutely incredible pictures of animals on 500px.

500px / Blog / Best of 2012: Animals.