The Decisive Frame: A Workshop on Composition

Overview

This workshop is built around five working principles: orientation, perspective, focal length, angle, and the classic compositional rules. We will cover these in the Akademie space, and then put them to the test on the sunny streets of Copenhagen.

What will be covered:

Why composition? The Art of Composition in its essence is seeing + thinking, and then allowing for feeling, before the shutter — not after.

Horizontal vs. Vertical Vertical has dominated in recent years due to Social Media. But we will explore how horizontal opens up space and context. Vertical is powerful, it focuses our attention, and we will learn the strengths of both.

Perspective Photography flattens a three-dimensional world onto a flat plane.

Focal length Selecting your lens is important, therefore we will also explore focal lengths and what they do: expanding space and exaggerating the near and far. What is used in classic street and documentary photography. You will learn to choose the lens for the feeling, not just the frame.

Shooting angle Shooting Eye-level, Low angle and High angle and its effects. On a person, the same subject reads three different ways depending only on where the camera sits.

Three compositional rules Central, Rule of Thirds, Frame-within-frame (doorways, windows, architecture) are explored in depth as well.

Part 2 — Street Shooting

• Exploring the same scene, both orientations, feeling the difference.
• Perspective shots: using a reflective surface.
• One subject, three angles (low, eye-level, high).
• A deliberate hunt for one centered shot, one thirds shot, one frame-within-frame shot.