Photo CompositionTag:

Guest Blog: One Thing Winning Images Have in Common
Posted on by Pete Wright Posted in Tips & Tricks
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Guest Blog: One Thing Winning Images Have in Common

One of the most beneficial things a photographer can do as an artist is enter print competition. Not for the sake of winning awards, but to grow, learn and improve. If you look at some of the general rules that have been applied with success to images in print competition over the years, you can find some great composition and presentation lessons that make for better images.

By Pete Wright
By Pete Wright

Let’s look at using compositional cues to make sure you drive your audience to look at the part of the image that is the most important to relay the message you are trying to get across.

Compositionally the two most common placements of a subject in an image are based on the rule of thirds or bulls-eye. The rule of thirds, the most popular, would be like placing a tic-tac-toe game over your image, as shown above.

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Guest Blog: Creating Versatile Images for Multiple Uses
Posted on by Pete Wright Posted in Tips & Tricks
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Guest Blog: Creating Versatile Images for Multiple Uses

When it comes to commercial applications, the creation of an image often takes place before a camera is even touched. From the standpoint of the person capturing the image, one of the most important factors, beyond the message, is how the image will be used.

petew
By Pete Wright

Whether you are on the front end of the process creating the concept for a campaign, in the middle capturing the images, or on the back end creating the finished work, it’s important to be clear on the overall vision of what the final presentation will be.

Many times, a company may decide they’ll be using an image that will cross many different media platforms: print (direct mail, pamphlets, magazine, billboards, etc.), social media or broadcast. Versatility is important for images like this. In other words, consider approaching an image so that it has a good amount of negative space for text and will work equally well if cropped vertically or horizontally.

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Posted on by Regan Dickinson Posted in Case Studies & Profiles
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Prints that Win: Snowy Morning

Snowy Morning by Cheri MacCallumCheri MacCallum, owner of Art by Cheri, Idaho Falls, is a photo painter extraordinaire. Photographers around the country send her files to paint digitally in Corel Painter to add that extra value that comes from painted portrait photo.

Moreover, MacCallum’s work has won various awards, including the LexJet Sunset Award two years running at the PPA Western District Competition. We profiled last year’s winner, Dennis the Menace, and had to wait for national competition judging to unveil this year’s winner, entitled Snowy Morning, which scored 100 at the PPA Western District Competition.

Snow Morning Award Winning Photo by Cheri MacCallum
This is the original capture of Snow Morning before Cheri MacCallum applied her digital painting magic.

MacCallum found the scene depicted in Snowy Morning on a little dirt road outside of Idaho Falls. The first snow had just blanketed the landscape and MacCallum saw great potential in the composition.

However, it wasn’t until she added the digital painting that she thought it would be competition-worthy. And competition-worthy it was, grabbing the attention of the judges for its composition, lighting and use of accent colors so that the viewer can almost feel the chill of that day, contrasted to the warm tones of the wood in the dilapidated fence and early winter foliage. “Adding the accent colors really helped a lot in the feeling and mood of the image,” she says.

“We went back a couple of weeks ago to see what it looked like in the summer, but we couldn’t find it,” says MacCallum. “We’ll have to try to figure out where it is so I can capture it in another season and contrast it with the winter scene.”

MacCallum printed the image for competition on LexJet Sunset Photo eSatin on her Canon iPF8300S, and says she chose the eSatin in part for its thickness and durability. “The year before I used a gloss paper. I liked how it looked, but it was very easy to ding and crimp, so I went with a thicker, more durable paper,” she adds.