compositions

I began this assignment prompt by searching through my personal albums, Pexels, Flickr, and through digital collections at the Library of Congress. Many collections caught my eye, but ultimately I really enjoyed searching through the William P. Gottlieb Collection that contains images documenting the jazz scene in New York City and Washington, D.C., from 1938 to 1948.

After cropping many photographs from this collection, I chose to highlight the above image of Frank Sinatra and Axel Stordahl at Liederkrantz Hall in New York, circa 1947. The original image is very busy, with Frank Sinatra in the foreground in the right-hand corner and the large orchestra in the background. I decided to crop the group of men in the background out using the 1:1 square preset and make Frank Sinatra the focal point, plus keeping him slightly off center to follow the rule of thirds. I also tried a similiar method after, instead cropping out Frank Sinatra and making the focal point the orchestra, but didn’t like the outcome as much because, for me, it’s too dark and has too much negative space (included below as well).

I took this photo during my winter trip after hiking to the top of the Mirador de Gibralfaro in Malaga, Spain. We reached the top of the viewpoint right before the sunset, and the colorful buildings of Malaga came alive. Although I could only capture one perspective of the view in a photo, taking a 360-degree glance from the viewpoint made me think how every individual I could see has lived a different story. From the cruise boats at the port to the port operators, the X-pats residing in the beach highrises, the tourists hiking up the mountain with me, and the Spaniards who have lived in Malaga their whole lives, each individual has a different upbringing and goal. I chose to focus on the Plaza de Toros de La Malagueta for the cropped image to highlight the Spanish traditions and culture associated with bullfighting. Although I believe bullfighting is unethical, it is fascinating that the Malaga Bullring is still functional and has become one of the most prominent bullrings in Spain. I named the image “The Matador” because that is the Spanish name for the bullfighter who tries to kill the bull. From this image, you can see inside the bullring, and it was easy for me to imagine the stadium full of people waiting to see who would win the fight. Cropping the image also helped remove some noise from the trees and grass along the hiking path. I followed the rule of thirds to ensure that the focal point brought the most attention and was more balanced. I love this image because if I were to focus further into the horizon on the freight ship in the background, I would have been able to consider the lives of a different group of people who sail the sea for a living.

Original: “Returning to Palm Beach International Airport” by Connor Skaryd is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

I went with the image I took late last year of Palm Beach International Airport when I was returning from west palm beach. The original photo was taken from my plane seat and just trying to capture my return home to Florida and taking the image of the sunset and the sky with the beautiful clouds about their airport. the airport. There was no way for me to avoid catching the plane’s wing in the image, but it really doesn’t cover much.

Derivative “Bridge Between Ground and Clouds” by Connor Skaryd is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

The cropped version is really focused on the control tower. Unintentionally finding that it almost perfectly meets the bottom of the clouds with my angle, I zoomed in and narrowed the field of view from my phone’s camera to emphasize the sky about the tower and remove the airplane’s wing from the image.  I set the control tower to be at the bottom left intersection of the rule of thirds to really emphasize the sky. I set it to a more panoramic scale to really show the clouds and the deep red and oranges of the sunset. Making it so that the sun lit sky was the border between the ground and the clouds, that was then bridged by the air traffic control tower.

My goal with this edit is to make the air traffic control tower of the airport be a literal bridge to the sky in the image, while it is a metaphorical bridge to the sky, with the controllers in the tower guiding planes into the air. The main thing I wish I could change is having a better resolution and not having it so pixelated.

Allow me to set the scene: imagine a windy day in October, cars are honking as they pass on narrow streets, between buildings whose age is reflected in their architectural design. As people walk by on the sidewalk they converse in in rapid French, and as you look around you see the juxtaposition of history and modernity in everything from the buildings, to the fashion, to the food!

This was what I saw and felt when I was fortunate enough to get to visit France with my partner’s family in October of 2023. As someone who’d never left the United States and had only recently started going on trips out of Florida, visiting France was an eye-opening experience. It certainly didn’t hurt that one of my favorite stories is The Phantom of the Opera!

Naturally, while I was there I tried to capture the moment in photos as much as possible; suffice to say that some were more successful than others.

Here is one such attempt. While you can see some of the unique architecture that so intrigued me, there is a lot going on in this particular photo.

For starters, my nail managed to sneak in at the bottom of the frame, causing some distraction. Beyond my nail-photo-bomb-faux-pas, this photo has a lot of empty space at the bottom where the road is. The traffic for the cars is going multiple ways, and despite how striking this building was to me, there’s too much motion around it to keep focus.

I would also say objects on the sides of the image, like that the street lights and the cut off bicycle change the ambiance of the photo, making it feel like I’ve cropped something out and that this was unintentional.

So, with a little cropping magic, I attempted to refocus the photo on the building that drew my eye initially.

In this crop I removed the most egregious error by cutting a lot of the empty space at the bottom. At first I tried to crop all the way up to the ground floor of the building, but that cut off the person on the moped, so I left them some space. Since this also zooms in the focus, you can see the green light, so it makes sense why there’s a little bit of empty space behind the cars that are driving forwards.

By also cropping the traffic going the opposite way it reduced some of the distraction of the photo, as both cars and people are walking around the building. To really draw focus to the building I tried to line up the center of the windows with the center-left side of the grid, so that it was de-centered.

I wanted to better capture the feel of the city as I remember it. By reducing a lot of the clutter around the photo it allowed me to focus on the smaller details, like the brown brick chimney on the building on the back right-hand side, or the people walking across the cross walk. Even the bright pink of the neon sign on the ground floor of the building peeking through the plant highlights the juxtaposition of past and present that was everywhere in Paris.

After this assignment I’ve certainly learned to appreciate the power of a good crop!

My cat is my favorite little creature ever. She is often the first person I interact with in the morning and the last one before I fall asleep. I have always loved the color green, especially a nice lime green, but when I got Luna at 13 years old, green took on a new meaning. I associate that particular shade of green with life, happiness, and head butts. For this assignment I chose this image because I thought her eyes really popped in it. I cropped the original image so that her head was lined up with the center of the left grid line according the rule of thirds. The cropped image brings more focus to her cute face and vibrant eyes, with the added bonus of cutting out the messy state of my room and that massive dust bunny.

For this blog post, I mainly went through photo albums of trips I’ve taken with my mom. We’ve taken each other to so many scenic places where in each I take an obscene amount of bad photos. I have always liked the original (bottom) photo, my mom’s stance is very triumphant, and her overlaying the trunk of the tree strangely evokes her strength and grit. As you can imagine, beyond the edges of this photo are the spectacular views off the rim of the canyon. This is the view she is taking in, though I felt like because she is centered in my photo of her, it seems that she is looking at me (the camera person). Based on the rule of thirds, I cropped her onto the intersection of the right-hand third of the photo, to make it appear more like she is looking into the negative space, toward the canyon. I also got rid of the foreground of the photo to try and create some forced perspective, as if the camera is looking up at her from a much steeper angle, as if she has just climbed a mountain.

“A Man Riding a Horse in the Middle of a Field” by Cemrecan Yurtman on Unsplash

“Riding To Freedom” by Sinbad Adjuik, licensed under CC BY.

For Riding To Freedom, I was presented with a captivating image of a cowboy riding a horse against a breathtaking sunset backdrop. The original composition was a testament to the beauty of nature, yet I saw an opportunity to enhance it by focusing on the horse and rider and simplifying the background.
The original image was quite dynamic, but the subject was lost in the vastness of the background. There was a lot of empty space above the rider, and the horizon line felt too high. The background elements, while beautiful, detracted from the focus of the rider and horse in motion.
By cropping the image, I was able to bring the horse’s action and the rider’s silhouette into sharper focus, while also simplifying the background by removing excess sky. This adjustment allowed the dynamic elements of the image to stand out more, particularly the striking halo effect created by the sun behind the horse.
I also applied the rule of thirds, a fundamental principle in photography and design, to give the composition a more dynamic feel. Instead of centering the subject, I positioned the rider and horse off-center, along the imaginary lines that divide the image into thirds both horizontally and vertically. This technique makes the image more natural and less static, enhancing the overall visual appeal.