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Taking Better Landscape Photos Part 2Taking your photography to the next level - From happy snapper to serious amateur landscape photographerTip 2 - Aim for a balanced compositionThe goal of this article is to teach you about how to compose an image. I can't teach you everything about composition in a single article but if I can teach you to think and plan your compostion and to learn from other photographers by thinking about what they have done then I feel that I have taught you an invalueable lesson.The Rule or ThirdsThe idea behind the rule of thirds is that you should place the point of interest (the subject) of the image, one third away from a border. Also instead of having the horizon exactly in the middle of the photograph you might place it at a third of the way up from the bottom or a third of the way from the top. So there is either twice as much sky as ground or vice versa. (The horizon is roughly one third from the top & the Sun is roughly one third from the right) If a person is facing to the right then place the person on third in from the left giving the viewer of the image the sense that he/she can follow either the subjects is movement or observe what the subjects is interested in. If a tree is in the picture then don't always try to fit the whole tree in the picture. Don't be afraid to crop part of objects in the picture. Just bear in mind that you may need to leave some space around the edge if you plan to crop the image digitally at a later time. See below for more about the digital cropping of an image. You can experiment with using the tree to 'frame' the picture. Breaking the rulesKen Duncan does not like the rule of thirds. He doesn't seem to like rules period! So who are you going to listen to, me, a part time blogger or Ken Duncan a world famous landscape photographer? Seriously though Ken does have a point, you should not be a slave to rules and I agree but I think that you will find that while Ken's panoramas don't always obey the rule of thirds, they do have an obvious balance. One good time to disregard the rule of thirds is when the subject is symmetrical, a classic example is the Taj Mahal, and other examples include the reflection of mountains across smooth lakes. I disagree with Ken when it comes to ignoring the rules, I think that they are a great teaching tool that can help you to learn but I agree that you should not be a slave to them. I think the important thing is aim for an appealing composition that has a balanced feel to it regardless of whether the horizon is exactly on third in from the top or bottom. The thing that you should not do is just point your camera and shoot without thinking about how to best arrange your shot. Try moving closer or further from the subject and changing the angle between the subject and the background. You can also use a zoom lens to similar effect, zoom in or out until your composition looks balanced.CroppingTaking the picture is not the end of the story. With digital cameras you can upload your images onto a computer and edit them. Power lines can magically disappear and panoramic photos can be spliced together. One of things you can do with an image editor that can affect the balance of your final composition is to crop the image. One way to think of cropping is as slicing strips from the sides of the image. So if there is too much blank sky in your image or the ration of height to widths doesn’t feel right or you just want to imagine that you are taking panoramic photographs like Ken Duncan, then you can just slice the extra parts of the image away. Image editors that can do cropping include programs such as The Gimp (freeware), Photoshop or even IrfanView. If you are saving your image as a Jpeg file then be sure to select the highest quality (100%) that you can to preserve the quality of your image otherwise you may be disappointed with the final print. One of the problems with cropping an image is when you go to print or frame your image, you may find that the dimensions of cropped image are no longer standard. That can mean that the print has large white borders or that the sides of the image were not printed. Printing and framing images with non standard dimension can also cost more since the machines will not be set up for a non standard size and extra manual labor may be needed. Another thing to bear in mind is that a larger crop will result in fewer remaining pixels from your original image. A pixel is a rectangular block of color. A digital image is made up of a grid of pixels arranged in columns and rows (like days in a calendar). Because pixels are rectangular they do not naturally make for a smooth image. Large pixels make an image look chunky, so the smaller the pixels the smoother the image. More pixels mean smaller pixels and that makes for a smoother print. (Magnified pixels)  (Normal Size) That’s why camera retailers often emphasize the number of mega pixels of an image that a camera can take. (A mega pixel is a million pixels.) More pixels mean a higher quality print and more freedom with cropping your image.
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