 How's it? How's it? How are you doing today? Right so there is one rule in photography that you absolutely cannot break if you want your photograph to be successful. I'm sure at some point you know you've had one of your pictures maybe on a display or a gallery or you know photo club exhibition or just online and you've kind of wondered why you know people will come along and they'll look at your picture and then almost immediately kind of you know poodle off to the next image right? They're not spending any time with yours. This is because you are breaking a cardinal rule in your photography is that you are giving people an excuse to move on to the next picture. Now I don't mean because oh the picture itself is rubbish or they don't care for the subject or these sort of things you know obviously they play a role in these things but I'm talking about something more fundamental in your image and that is the the composition that is sabotaging your efforts. Now in composition you know we're bombarded with rules ideas oh these things you must do this you must do that blah blah blah and you know they have been built up over time you know longer before photography was around they were doing you know these sort of things within painting and we often become hamstrung with these so-called rules that we think that so long as something conforms to a rule then that's okay then that's all that is needed and I think this is a great big problem in photography and I want you to stop thinking about composition in terms of rules and more as guidelines. As I said the only rule that we need to obey with photography is to keep the viewer looking at your photograph for as long as is possible and that's where you use the the ideas and the suggestions in composition to your advantage rather than sabotaging your images. So how are we going to keep the person looking at your photograph you know for as long as possible so they can really get get involved with it and start to love your picture? Well the simple thing is of course not to give them excuse to to look away there is I'm sure that maybe I'm sort of sucking something out of my thumb here but I seem to recall at some point listening about this idea of of circular composition that the eyes led from one thing to the another to the another to another and and to the back to the start so that the eyes constantly contained within the frame that you put together a composition that doesn't give the viewer a reason to disappear. Leading lines we are most of us are familiar with leading lines you know one of those rules of composition and they're extremely strong but instead of leading the eye through the picture to something in you know there in the distance give a little bit of depth so apart from those naughty leading lines taking us on to the next photograph what are the things in your image that could be tempting the wandering eye to sort of start to stray away from the heart of your photograph? One of the the big suspects in all of this is light is your bright areas within the image specular highlights you know bits of brightness just this there on the edge of the frame that the eye wants to go and look say what is that thing over there right and and as soon as they do that then it kind of tends to stumble and fall off off of the off of the print so what can you do to make sure that this these these highlights are not really sort of sabotaging your photography and we can turn to our old friend the vignette now i can see the gasp of breath i can hear it right oh vignette oh my god they're horrible yes right vignettes can be used um horrendously right i think it's a it's a thing right but we want to have subtle use here and i'm going to stress the word subtle because everything that you're doing here needs to be subtle if he's not signposting things you're making it too obvious you're making it feel like you have constructed something fake and people aren't going to engage with it in so much and vignettes fall into this category 100 percent so burn in the edge of your print just subtly oh just a little bit just around the edges it doesn't have to be a neat little border that's you know feathered 10 pixels and then taken down two thirds of stock just a little bit just a roughly you know make it look natural don't don't be mechanical about that process right just a little bit around the edges that's going to stop the eye wandering on it's going to keep the eye on the page i mean i don't remember the last time anybody talked about that as you know i've certainly never seen anybody talk about on youtube about this idea of just darkening down the edges right now i'm going to throw you a curveball because of course we've been talking about single images but what happens if you have a photo series a wedding album you know a series of of prints of portraits that workers of you know triptych or whatever think about cartoon strips you know the old supermans and you know the graphic novels of today and all that sort of stuff how those strips visually led you from one frame to another so you knew exactly where to look on this very busy page of little squares all of what we've talked up to this point now just throw it out right because what we actually don't want to do is encourage the viewer to look at the next picture so take that circular motion but then add an offering right say this is where i want you to look next and then you put something outside there for them to look at to next right it's one of the quirks of photography isn't it that whatever you hear as a kind of d should do it this way then there's something else to say no actually you should do it the other way you need to understand when to employ these ideas to give a little bit more thought not just to the circle of rules of composition but more to the way that they are going to influence how the viewer interacts with digests gets to grips with and responds to your photograph simply conforming to rules of composition is going to make those weeds come back and entangle the viewer but of course that's what yes you want what a rubbish analog what rubbish analogy you don't want to we want to tangle the viewer i don't know let's make it let's call it right the composition is going to be built up into the middle is an ice rink and the viewer just slips off to the next thing so let's let's call it that right it's the ice rink of composition but we want people to in there and so you need to be mindful of how you're going to use these things how you're going to employ them to affect rather than just going well it's a nice balanced composition if you are interested in finding out more about these conventions of composition and how you can use them to keep the viewer's eye within the frame then check out this video here it's been an absolute pleasure talking with you today thank you ever so much and i'll see you again soon