Breaking the Rules

/ wombat4230

My last post for Module 7 on Composition was about rules for composing great photos, but there are times when you should ignore the rules ( well some of them) and experiment with creative shots like intentional blur to get a painterly impressionist image or abstract photography

Rules that can be broken

  1. Rule: The Rule of Thirds
  2. Rule: Fill The Frame to Draw Focus on the Subject
  3. Rule:Leading Lines
  4. Rule: Shoot With the Sun Behind You.
  5. Rule: Avoid Shooting Portraits at Midday.
  6. Rule: Blur is Bad
  7. Rule: Keep Your Horizons Strait
  8. Rule: Never Shoot From Behind Your Subject
Intentionally Blurred Subject gives an impressionist painting or abstract feel to a photo. I took this shot a few weeks ago demonstrating shutter speed , I like the way the people passing through the plaza leave colour light trails of skin and clothing and the one man who was standing fairly still until I’d almost finished and then started to move so you can see it’s a person but there’s no fine detail just movements
Instagram post by Fabian Gonzalez
Instagram post by Zolephoto

There’s a great article on National Geographic on breaking the rules and I encourage it for further reading

ttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-tips/breaking-the-rules

Activity 7.2: Breaking the rules

Ok, now it’s time to break the rules.

For this activity, pick 2-3 ‘rules’ of composition and capture a series of images that deliberately break them.

Analyse the results. Did they work or not? If so, why? If not, why not?

The Results

I chose to create a series of intentionally blurred images with crowd movement as I really like the impressionist/abstract painting look. Heres two that i shot around Parramatta CBD

  • As the world go by

Sometimes intentionally blurring a subject doesn’t work, long exposures during the day can be destroyed by too much light into the camera, or it just looks badly wrong and not artistic, this can be overcome with ND filters and UV filters, by putting tape on the viewfinder and using live view to focus.

With parts of architecture it can look weird focusing on one aspect of a building if the shot is badly composed. Just because your breaking rules doesn’t mean you can, not compose the image in a visually pleasing way.

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