The Nikon D90 Companion

Chapter 8. Finding and Composing a Photo

EXPLORING THE ART OF PHOTOGRAPHY

As with most creative endeavors, you can divide your photographic study into two areas: craft and artistry. Craft encompasses your technical understanding of photographic process—how different parameters affect your image and how you use the controls on your camera to set those parameters. Artistry is the process of using your craft skill to represent a scene, person, or moment as a photographic image—ideally an image that evokes something of the “truth” of your subject that you felt when shooting. In this chapter, you’re going to focus on the artistry side of things and explore how you visualize and compose an image.

Learning to See Again

If you’re like most people, you’ve probably experienced something like this: You can’t find your keys (or your sunglasses, your favorite pen, your wallet, or whatever) so you look on your desk, in your pockets, in your coat, and on the kitchen table. You try to retrace your steps to determine where you might have been when you last had your keys. You look and look and then, finally, an hour later, you see them sitting out in the open in the middle of your desk—right there in the first place you looked.

This type of maddening situation happens because although it’s very easy to look at something, it can be far more complicated to actually see it. We tend to use the words look