Tom Clark - Digital Photography Composition For Dummies

After a set is built and lit, it will remain the same for as long as you want it to. However, after you're finished with the set, you can easily change it around and create a brand-new set with whatever type of lighting you need. Building sets gives you 100 percent control over your backgrounds and enables you to focus on your subject as the priority.

Depending on your budget and the kind of photography you're involved in, building sets can be as simple as creating the illusion of one wall that's a certain color and texture or as complicated as creating a space with multiple

levels and rooms that are furnished and appear functional. A commercial studio has walls on standby, ready to be painted and brought on set as well as rolls of linoleum flooring ready to be rolled out. Windows built into the walls have backdrops outside of them with blurry images of nature depending on the season you're trying to sell. Props are brought in and the photographer composes the image so it appears to be a real room.

If you have the studio space but can't currently build elaborate sets, you can use a few tricks to build nice sets for portraits and editorial fashion photography. One idea is to purchase 4-foot-x-8-foot pieces of foam core and use them as walls. These pieces of foam are lightweight, affordable, and easy to prop up. You can spray paint them, but the best way to give them life is to attach fabric to the surface. If you cover them with fabric, you can remove that fabric and reuse the foam boards multiple times. Plus, you can find many interesting fabrics that have designs and patterns that would be difficult to achieve with spray paint.

You may want to keep your own backgrounds simple and use a shallow depth of field to minimize the amount of detail revealed. This way you can suggest a certain background exists without having to pay elaborate attention to detail in creating it.

In some cases, the background in a scene is the most descriptive or one of the most descriptive elements to support your subject. This situation can happen because of these reasons:

• The scene doesn't include many supporting elements.

• The subject itself has few descriptive qualities.

• The background reveals the location, which is important to the message.

Take advantage of a background that includes useful information. Consider, for example, the images in Figure 9–5, which show the back of a woman's head. Because you see so few details, the woman remains a mystery. These images work together to tell you that the woman is a tourist. The only reason you know that about her is because of the backgrounds. She's facing the backgrounds; in the top image she's taking in the architecture, and in the bottom image she's taking in the detailed sculpture. In this diptych, the background speaks to you, and the subject's purpose is to make you imagine yourself in her position.

50mm, 1/50 sec, f/2,400

Figure 9–5:Use the background as the sole source of information supporting the subject.

Train yourself to seek out interesting backgrounds that offer information about your subject. Think creatively and look for relationships between the subject and the background elements. You can make connections through color, texture, tonality, simplicity/chaos (a simplistic subject would fit into a simplistic background and would contrast with a chaotic background), shape, and even literal elements.

Keep the following tips in mind to effectively choose and use a background:

The color scheme in a background works with your subject to control the message in an image.Each color has a different message, which typically is derived from natural senses and cultural conditions. Blue typically gives the feeling of openness or cool temperatures, but in some cases it represents depression. Orange can give the feeling of warmth and is often associated with stimulating a viewer's appetite. Green can be associated with freshness and has a calming effect in some cases. Chapter 6 has more information on colors and their meanings.

A background's tonality speaks greatly to the meaning of an image.

A high-key image is one that has light tones and gives the feeling of cleanliness, life, and energy. A low-key image has mostly dark tones and speaks a more mysterious, melodramatic, and quiet message.

Texture in a background can take on many different characteristics.

It can be smooth, rough, old, new, clean, dirty, and so on. It should be appropriate for your subject and your message.

A solid background with few details and elements is considered simplistic, and a background with lots of texture, lines, shapes, colors, and tones often appears chaotic.The same goes for your subject. A chaotic subject stands out more on a simplistic background and blends in more to a chaotic background. For example, picture a floral-print sofa in front of a solid-colored wall. Then picture the same sofa in front of a wall with floral-print wallpaper. Each background could be interesting, but each represents the sofa in a different way.

Literal elements in the background tell you about the subject based on things you already know.A man and woman kissing in front of an altar, for example, have just been married. An adult in front of a chalkboard that has mathematic equations on it is most likely a teacher; a child in front of the same background is most likely a student.

Figure 9–6 shows a photograph that I took while shooting for a health-food restaurant. This wheatgrass shot showed one of their menu items, which they wanted to look heroic. After all, wheatgrass is supposed to do great things for you. Putting the raw product behind the prepared shot and getting a tight perspective worked out to my advantage in a few ways. For one, it suggests

that the product is fresh. Also, it helps you to understand what the product is. If you saw just the green liquid in the shot glass, you might or might not know what it was. If you saw just the grass, you would assume it was grass, but you might not know what kind of grass. Seeing the two together lets you know exactly what you're looking at.

50mm, 1/50 sec, f/4, 500

Figure 9–6:When combined with the subject, this background reveals important details.

In This Chapter

Running through the light sources you may use

Managing light quality and intensity

Finding out how light interacts with your subject

Putting natural light to work in your shots

Making use of light's various colors

Light is the most important photographic element in any scene. After all, it's what makes photography possible. Even if you take the existence of light for granted, you should be aware that it dictates the message in your images just as strongly as any other element. For instance, a statue doesn't have the ability to change its expression or to move in any way, but you can use that statue to convey very different messages depending on the lighting style you use to photograph it.

This chapter shows you what light can say in an image and how to achieve the lighting you want based on what you want to say. For a more in-depth look at lighting, check out Digital Photography Lighting For Dummies by Dirk Fletcher (Wiley).

In just one scene, you may use many different forms of light from many different sources. An infinite number of recipes for light exist, and each controls the contrast throughout the composition of a scene. As photographer, you're the chef