Chapter 8 Assignments
If you apply the shooting techniques and tools that you’ve learned in the previous chapters to these assignments, you’ll improve your ability to incorporate good composition into your photos. Make sure you experiment with all the different elements of composition and see how you can combine them to add interest to your images.
Learning to see lines and patterns
Take your camera for a walk around your neighborhood and look for patterns and angles. Don’t worry as much about getting great shots as about developing an eye for details.
Changing your perspective
Take a photo from a standing position, then move down lower to the ground and photograph the same thing. Try to get up higher by using a stepladder or just by inching up on your toes. Compare your images and see how different your subject looks from each point of view.
Using the aperture to focus attention
Depth of field plays an important role in defining your images and establishing depth and dimension. Practice shooting wide open, using your largest aperture, for the narrowest depth of field. Then find a scene that would benefit from extended depth of field, using very small apertures to give sharpness throughout the scene.
Leading viewers into a frame
Look for scenes where you can use elements as leading lines, and then look for framing elements that you can use to isolate your subject and add both depth and dimension to your images.
Adding a sense of scale
Try to find a subject that seems larger than life, such as a very tall building or statue. Photograph your subject with no people around, then bring a friend and have them pose near your subject. Compare the images and determine which one you prefer.
Breaking all the rules
Head out into your neighborhood and try to break as many of the rules you have learned in this chapter as possible. Enjoy the freedom of not being confined to one style or form of photography. Look back at your images after you have returned home, and see if any catch your eye.
Share your results with the book’s Flickr group!
Join the group here: flickr.com/groups/canon6dfromsnapshotstogreatshots