A matter of composition

Albert Pedrosa
Photo mania

“I’M very passionate about photography and I’d love to learn more.” That’s what my student told me during our one-on-one photography tutorial. He’s a Maldivian and it is his second time here in the Philippines. The first time was after the super typhoon that devastated Tacloban. His partner is a filipina who hails from Tacloban and now works for a travel agency in the Maldives.

One of the many things I love about my work as a photography teacher is the opportunity to meet people from different parts of the world. It’s quite interesting because you get to know their culture and how it is to live in their country. Plus, the people that I meet are photographers, so they tend to talk about their country in terms of photographs.

I normally start my tutorial by asking a lot of questions about how you started out in photography and what genre you are most interested in. From there, I try to understand your journey as a photographer and how much effort you are willing to give to learn the art. We all have different learning curves and learning photography is no exception.

I started rolling out my pictures to show to him what type of photography interests me, and in the middle of my presentation, he suddenly told me he knows a lot about me and read most of my articles. What can you say? The power of the internet makes the world so small.

Since he is a self taught photographer, he knows his metering and focusing quite well. He shoots purely in manual mode. I wonder if somebody told him that pros only shoot in manual. He also understands the relationship between ISO, shutter and aperture. The only thing that needs improvement is his composition and an understanding of how the semi-automatic mode works.

I told him that finding the subject is one of the easiest parts. It’s the first element that you see immediately. The difficult part is finding the right background, midground and foreground to position your subject. When you’re shooting landscapes and architectural, your elements are fixed so you’ll have to find the right angle to fit them all in one frame.

The fundamentals of composition such as the rule of thirds, leading lines and patterns, which surprisingly he didn’t know, were instrumental in our discussion of composition. I think many newbie photographers tend to miss this part of fundamentals. Sometimes, they start breaking the rules of composition before they even learn them.

Composition is one of the integral parts of a photograph and it is easy to learn, but it takes time and practice to get hold of it and takes a lot of experimentation to break it. Keep on shooting, everyone!

photomania.sunstar@gmail.com / www.grp.ph