From the course: Photography: Advanced Composition

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 24,000 courses taught by industry experts.

Layers: Foreground and background

Layers: Foreground and background

From the course: Photography: Advanced Composition

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Layers: Foreground and background

“

- As we've already discussed, we're throwing around a lot of ideas in this course. Some of them are very simple, some are more sophisticated. But I can say that, in my opinion, the most difficult compositional thing for anyone to learn, is that, because a photograph flattens the three dimensional world it's possible for an object that's close to you to relate compositionally to an object that's far away. Here's a very simply example. I shot this on a dry lake bed in Death Valley, with the idea of relating that little black stone at the bottom, to that cloud at the top. The cloud is far away in the distance, the rock was up close, but here on the flat surface of this photograph, they exist in relationship to each other in a way they didn't in the real world. Here's another example. Using the hills there in the background with the light over them to balance the bridge over there on the left. If you were standing at this scene, looking at it with your eyes, you wouldn't see anything…

Contents