But that is not the only way to think of composition and in Lightroom and in Photoshop; there are easy tools available to assist you in cropping your images for more visual appeal.

When you are in the Develop module, and you start using the crop tool, it defaults to the “Rule of Thirds” grid.  However, you can find a menu on the main menu bar under Tools called “Crop Guide Overlay” and see what other choices are available.  The classic “Golden Spiral” is great for group portraits.  Contain the bulk of your visual interest in the tightest part of the spiral. The strong leading lines on the “Triangle” overlay frame angular images. You can use the keyboard shortcut “O” to cycle through the choices and help as you crop.  As with all things in LR, it is all non-destructive, so you can experiment as much as you like.

So we have our definitions straight, there are two basic orientations: vertical and horizontal.  Yes, there are squares and lots of other shapes, but vertical and horizontal are the ones most frequently used.  If you use their alternate names, portrait and landscape, you can quickly guess their most frequent subject matter.  Usually – nothing is “always” – there is an orientation that works best for certain subjects.

This isn’t complicated, right?  Long and tall subjects are usually put into a vertical format, and wide subjects into horizontal.

You need to look at the scene to determine which orientation will look better.  If you aren’t sure, shoot it in both formats; these are guidelines, not concrete rules.  Sometimes, the same subject can fit in either format.  For example, a horse is wide and made for horizontal.

But if you put the same horse in a different position, it may look better in vertical.

Horizon lines can be found in either format, but the general consensus is you don’t want them in the middle of the photograph.  If you put it in the middle, it is considered less pleasing to the eye.

Yeah, I know, it’s more than the horizon in the middle that makes the above photograph less pleasing.  To make things more confusing, a horizon line doesn’t always have to be an actual horizon; it might just be a prominent division that bisects your photograph.  Here is an example photograph with a little more to look at.  It has the line in the middle.  Some people still like this.

I prefer to move the line so that it is about one third up from the bottom of the image.  This will divide the photo into three areas, each occupying about a third of the space: water; glacier; and clouds.

Let’s combine these two ideas.  In the photo below, I wanted a vertical orientation.  It seems obvious because the bugler is standing; the tombstones are vertical; and the tree is tall.  I put the bugler in the bottom left and created a framing with the tombstones and the tree.  I intentionally made the bugler a small part of the image.  But I should have paid closer attention to the “horizon line” being created by the tree.

The photo loses much of its impact because of the horizon line.  When I shifted to a landscape orientation, with a crop, it was easy to eliminate the distraction of the horizon line.  I kept the bugler one third of the way into the photo, and he is still framed by the tree and tombstones.  He also becomes a larger component of the composition, but it is a better photo.

Composition can be a complicated, esoteric subject, but you shouldn’t avoid learning about it.  Some photographers love to argue and debate for hours about the true meaning of everything they do.  I believe you should understand the basics and use them to improve the quality of your work, but make the photographs you want to make while the pointy heads are having their debates.  The conventions and “rules” of composition shouldn’t intimidate you into putting your camera on shelf.

And with that, I’ll close with a bow and a suggestion to go out and have some fun.

I shot a few photos of the models at the Westcott Lighting booth, during Photoshop World.  Mark talked about that a couple weeks ago.  This lady, and her boyfriend model in steampunk attire, were probably the most interesting.  I drooled over the cool lighting gear in the booth and moved on, not really thinking about what I would do with the photo.

I was browsing through Matt Kloskowski’s book, Photoshop Compositing Secrets, and it looked pretty interesting.  He shows you many examples of his work and goes through the process extensively.  I highly recommend Matt’s book.  With a little time on my hands, today, I figured I’d give it a try.   I started by extracting the model from the background.

Since I don’t usually do this kind of stuff, my stock of background images is pretty small.  I settled on this door from a photowalk in Harper’s Ferry.

Matt keeps his eyes open during his travels for backgrounds that he can use later.  Guess I’ll need to keep that in mind for later efforts.  For best results, you should also use the same lens and perspective in all your composite photos.  I violated this rule completely – not only were my lenses unmatched, my photos are from two different cameras.   When I combined the photos, I immediately noticed the difference.  I put in some noise in the model photo to get closer to the look of the background photo.  I also needed to adjust the color balance to get everything similar.

In the end, I’m not sure I got it completely right.  The model still looks like she needs some more work to fit perfectly into the background.   You should give compositing a try.  It’s good practice for lots of photoshop techniques and can give you the a chance to create something that wasn’t there when you made the original photographs.

One of the tools in the next release of Photoshop is a much improved set of filters you can test out as part of the CS6 Beta http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/photoshopcs6/

However, there are some plug-ins which really work well right now.  I use OnOne Software’s Perfect Photo Suite 6.1, but Nik Software and Dfine also make good tools.

The specific tool in the suite is called Focal Point.  You can control just about everything about the blur and it creates it as a separate layer.  It works from inside both Lightroom and Photoshop.  You can also run it as a stand-alone application.  You overlay a grid for what you want to keep in focus.  You can adjust the shape, the density of the blur among other choices.  Here are two examples.  I started with this pirate figure and applied a nice circular blur.

Blurred image

A very popular commercial technique makes things in an image appear to be miniature models.  This replicates what you can accomplish with that tilt-shift.  It basically keeps a narrow band in the middle of the image in focus and blurs both the fore and background.  It starts with a rectangular or planar blur instead of the oval from the previous image.

Tilt-shift

These are just some of the ways you can add creative impact to your pictures as you process them.

With the GPS plugged in, all my photographs are geo-tagged.  The geographic coordinates are visible on the back of my camera, and they show up in the metadata when I import the photographs into Lightroom.  And a double-click on the coordinates, in Lightroom, will call up Google Maps, showing my location when the shutter was opened.   Unfortunately, there was no way to enter the coordinates into the metadata of photographs that were already in the Lightroom database.

In fact, I’ve been taking photographs longer than the GPS satellites have existed.  There certainly was no automatic capture of the metadata in my film days.  But I kept records of my shooting locations on 3×5 cards that recorded the contents of each negatives, including location.  I’ve stored those cards in a little plastic box for years.

Now, in Lightroom 4, I can rectify the lack of location data in my old photographs by using the Map Module.

This marina is located in McKay, Australia.  I was there for a couple of weeks on a business trip.  (Yes, I’ve been pretty lucky with some of my business trips.)  You can see the GPS field is empty because this photo was taken long before I had a GPS attached to my camera.

Since I know where this was taken, I can zoom into the map to the location.  While the map is up, I highlight the photo (or photos); right-click on the location; and Lightroom will add the location to my metadata.  The orange marker is where I was standing, and the location is now in my metadata.  Sweet!

When you zoom out, you can see groups of your photographs displayed.  As you zoom into the groups, the photographs will be broken out of the groups to their exact locations.

So, with more than 50,000 photographs I have some work to do.  I’ve created a smart collection that gathers all images without GPS coordinates to make this task easier.  No, I won’t put GPS data into every photograph.  I don’t need the data for model shoots, weddings, or family photographs, etc.  If I’m not worried about precision, I can assign a group of photographs taken in a general vicinity and assign them all a location.   For example, all my photographs taken on the grounds of Schloss Hohenschwangau, in Bavaria, can have an identical location.

I will continue to attach my GPS during my photowalks and when I visit new places.  If you secretly want to join me in geo-tagging photographs, but don’t want to buy a GPS, you now have the capability to enter the locations after the shoot.  It’s just another way to have fun with your photography.  Just don’t let Mark know, or he will taunt you, too.