Harold Davis - Creative Collection , Composition, Lighting, and Landscapes

• I focused on the water drop, letting the flower in the background go out of focus to become an abstraction.

200mm macro, 36mm extension tube, 1/5 of a second at f/32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted

• Title page: The soft folds of the hills balanced the clouds in this California coastal range landscape.

120mm, 1/640 of a second at f/10 and ISO 200, hand held

Creative Composition

Digital Photography Tips & Techniques

Harold Davis

• I stitched this panorama of the Golden Gate together from ten captures to give a sense of the entire vista from moonrise to sunset.

Each exposure: 42mm at f/4.5 and ISO 100, tripod mounted

Creative Composition: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques
by Harold Davis

Published by
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Copyright 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

All photographs Harold Davis.

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-0-470-52714-6

Manufactured in the United States of America

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• Page 6: I shot this detail of an artfully decorated car using my 105mm macro lens to capture the full detail of the painting at 1/800 of a second at f/8 and ISO 200, hand held.

Drawing is deception. Bruno Ernst

A simple observation, that a work of art is not the literal equivalent of the subject it portrays, has been long been known to photographers as well as artists in other types of media. Since the days of the Renaissance, painters such as Leonardo da Vinci have known that perspective rendering is an optical trick. Many of the best creations of M. C. Escher exploit the visual confusion between three-dimensional reality and the way this reality is portrayed on a flat surface.

So if a photograph is not reality, then what is it? There are a probably a number of good answers to this question. My working definition is that a photograph is a two-dimensional image that owes some or all of its origin to a version of its subject captured using chemistry or electronics.

This definition is broad enough to include any photograph. From the viewpoint of the working photographer, it leads immediately to questions about photographic composition, including:

• What are the tools of photographic technique that you can use to create, and improve, photos?
• If a photo portrays a slice of life, how can you slice and dice lifeand how should your photo be framed to reflect that slicing and dicing?
• How do you improve the coherence and consistency of a photo within its frame?
• Since life involves the passage of time and story-telling, what kinds of strategies can you can use to integrate time and narrative into your photographs?
• How can the subject matter of your photo best be integrated with the visual appearance of the photo to create emotional impact?

In Creative Composition: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques I tackle these questions and issues from a practical viewpoint, and in the context of digital photography. This is not a book about Art School rules. This is a book about becoming a better photographer.