Pagans the Christmas

Someone posted this photo on Facebook. Through the years I have read a bit about Christmas an I’m fully aware of how un-Christian Christmas really is, and how the “clean” version we see today is just over a century old. Yet, I have never head of Krampus. I went looking for information. The first thing I found was a Wikipedia article. It mentioned the Czech Republic and by a happy coincidence my Czech friend was online. I asked her if she knows this character and she replied with a video from her home village

The clip Banka sent me. Weirdos! Next they will have fat men wearing red outfits.

Reading a bit more about Christmas I found that 25 December was already establish asthe date by the mid 4th century already. That gives us 1500 years or 25ths. Possible reasons for this date include it being 9 months after the day thought of as conception, connections with Jesus to the sun saving the world from darkness and taking advantage of the normal holiday season that was already used by many cultures. Many people argue that it was chosen to override other religions. This may well be, but how is that different from what so many other religions do?

The Christmas traditions we know today were adopted when pagan cultured converted were pulled into Christianity. People would convert and would worship the new god, but they pretty much continued with their former ways and traditions with little immediate change. The “pure” forms of Christianity we know today did not exist until rather recently.

I have heard and read many claims that the timing and traditions we have for Christmas were intentional taken to try  and draw attention away from Pagan worship, but from what I read it seem to have been a more organic process, where dates and traditions were “chosen” because that is just what you do at this time of the year.

I am all for dissing Christmas and pointing at the Oh-So-Holy celebration, but don’t throw rubbish like this around and just say: “THAT is what Christmas is all about.” Get your facts straight. You don’t like it, then don’t celebrate it, or just celebrate it the way you want. It is not as if it’s the same all over the world anyway. Mexicans writing to the Three Wise Men instead of Santa, anyone?

Side note: The people who attack Christmas, waging a “War on Christmas” likely know more about the holiday than 99% of Christians. If they wanted to wage a war then it would be on Easter, the celebration of the reason Jesus came to earth, not the silly later created celebration of his birthday on the date that he was not born on with traditions that have nothing to do with Jesus. All they have to do for Christmas is point at it and say: “You idiots don’t even know what you are doing”

Aiins World at night, planning.

On Saturday I want to go to Aiins World to take night photos. I seem to remember someone telling me that you don’t shoot night scapes in full night, but at dusk. This way you will have nice sparkly lights, but still a bit of natural light to show you the outlines of buildings. That means you need to know the time of sunset. According to my Google Calendar sunset is:

17:17 Sunset
17:46 End of civil twilight
18:19 End of nautical twilight
18:50 End of astronomical twilight

Say what?!

From what I can figure out Twilight (not the sad excuse for a film) is a period of time, while Dusk is the end of said period. For example, Sunset starts Civil Twilight and it is ended with Civil Dusk.

So, it would seem Sunset is the moment that the sun dips under the true horizon. I say true horizon, because we are able to see the sun even though it is not strictly speaking there any more. This is due to the bending of light by the earth’s atmosphere.I could be wrong about the definition of sunset here, but it will be only a few minutes difference.

After sunset come the periods when light starts to shift. From what I understand Civil Twilight is when light starts fading, but we can still see everything. Nautical Twilight is when you are able to see the stars for navigation, and Astronomical Twilight is when you can start making astronomical observations. After that it is fully night.

Since I have never really gone out to do nightscapes, I am figuring that either Nautical or Astronomical Twilight will be the periods I want to shoot in, thus about 17:45 to 18:30.

Photo of Prague Castle at Night linked from Wikimedia commons.

Winter Wipeout

I spend a large part of my evening, rather I wasted a large part of the evening, watching the first few episodes of Wipeout Season 5. (Apparently there are seven complete seasons already and I haven’t even seen Season 4 yet)

Episode 1 (Christmas Special) Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 (Family Edition) Episode 5 Episode 6 (Valentines Day) Episode 7

Episode 8 Episode 9 (Hotties vs. Nerds) Episode 10 (Armed Forces) Episode 11 (Boss & Employees) Episode 12 Episode 13 Episode 14

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Home, Santa, and don’t spare the reindeer.

Snow came yesterday. Snow came down hard yesterday.  At least, for Korea it was a lot of snow. Looking at cars I estimate that there was about 10cm (3in) of snow in just a few hours. Korea is not set up for show like this. There is little along the lines of equipment to clean the roads and cars do not have special tires to get better traction. My scooter too, does not have special tires.

The initial scenes at school after about two hours of snow.

The snow started falling mid-afternoon and this prompted many schools to send students home early. Our school cancelled the last class of the day and gone were the students. Interestingly enough, the teachers were not sent home.

With the snow still falling I was getting worried about getting my scooter home. I didn’t want to leave it at school and take the bus, so I asked my vice principal who agreed to let me go early.

From the moment I left the indoor warmth things were not looking up for me. Snow was thick on the frozen water from the previous day and just getting my scooter into a moving state was an effort. When I did get moving it as only for about 100m, because that was about the only flat piece of road I had before hitting the first hill. This is Korea, after all.

I had just started the hill when I realised I did not have the weight to keep my tyres on the road for proper traction, so I got off and started pushing. Next I realised that, despite the lack of traffic, I could not keep pushing in the road itself, so I moved over to the walkway. My brain was working slowly, but it was working. Once on the sidewalk I restarted the bike and kept the throttle open just a tad to help me push. Without the assistance of the bike itself I found myself spinning in place like a cartoon character more often than was proper. In this way I was making steady progress up the hill, but things were going too well for Ullr’s liking

Half way up the hill and cars were passing, slowly.

I knew I needed to get some petrol in the bike, but did not know I needed it so soon. It’s not normally a problem because I flatten out often enough to  ride with very little petrol, but I didn’t consider that I would be on an incline for minutes at a time instead of mere seconds. This let all the petrol flowing to the back of the tank and away from the feeder hole. Scooter went BRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrr……. (silence)

There I was, stuck a third of the way up the hill with a decision to make. Would I take the scooter back to the school and get a bus or tough it out and start pushing? I decided to push.

What was I thinking? Between me cartoonishly spinning I place and the bike going sideways because of the direction of pressure on it, things were going painfully slow.

When I finally reached the top I was able to free downhill, but with idiot high school students who see you and then somehow things you disappear when they look down, I was almost in two crashes, both of which would have turned out worse for the morons.

The process of going up and down was repeated twice more. At one point I had to back up and get a run going to get myself up a small incline onto a walkway. Oh, the fun. If the whole situation was not as ridiculously funny as it was I would have been swearing like a pirate.

All turned out well though. I managed to get petrol about two thirds of the way home, but still ended up walking into the apartment sweat soaked and exhausted. Needless to say I did not go to the gym last night.

Photo I shot on the way home

On a happier note, our guild killed not just the first boss, but the second raid boss of the expansion. We are finally a raiding guild again, with our names on the scoreboard.

Deoksugung Project

My quest to give my live a bit of meaning beyond gaming and a few scattered photos have been gaining steam. At one point I had been in 6 cities in the span of 2 months. Granted, two were my own city and Seoul, but that still leaves, Ansan, Daegu, Busan and Andong.

Keeping myself this busy does have its drawbacks. I crave days when I can do nothing but play World of Warcraft and sleep, with a bit of eating in between. I’m forever looking for things to do and then trying to fit people in to these plans. Being this busy is also making me put things of that can be done later. Sometimes, however, I put them off for 6 months and then have to rush to do whatever it was I wanted to do.

The Deoksugung Project is one of the things I kept on putting off. I had it on my calendar for months, and somehow managed to only visit it on the second last evening. It was an “exhibition” by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in which they lit up the buildings in Deoksu Palace. I admit that I was a little disappointed by what I saw, but at least some decent photos came out of it, and in the end that is why I was there, right?

All the photos were shot in manual mode, usually at f/8.0 and shutter speeds as high as 10 seconds. More often than not I had my focal length as wide as it would go, 24mm

Portrait photography

On Sunday I went for my first solo off-camera photo session. It just so happens that it was also my first time going with the intention of getting portrait photos.

A young woman from my town volunteered to let me abuse her time in the hope of getting a good photo of herself out of it. I think I convinced her when, out of all the people at the Language Exchange I walked up to her and asked her personally, saying that I have seen many of her Facebook photos and know that she is quite photogenic.

We met close to my apartment because we live only a block from each other and made out way to a park which I thought might be nice for photograph.

When we arrived I set up my stand and umbrella for only the second time ever, and changed to setting on my flash to something I that I forgot the meaning of. All that was left was for just have Miss Joo to sit and pose in a natural way.

Turns out this photography things is not so difficult to do. Sure, I look at the photos and see how I can improve, but for the most part the photos are still much better than I would have done with no flash or with a phone.

By far my favourite photo of the day was this one. Shot with the flash at full power (apparently not the way to do it), shutter at 1/250, aperture at f8 and focal length at a fully extended 250mm. It looks rather good in colour as well, but Black and White is still where my heart is drawn to.

Looking at this photo I think a back light and the front flash with a little less power would have been great.

The internet happened!

Someone asked on Facebook how you find statistics about clip, and more specifically, how to see where the viewers were from. I thought I would give it a go and see if I could find out how. My very first hit was on a site that gave “statistics”. They had a, now old, list of most viewed video and this one was first. Haven’t seen it in a long time:

Of course I started following links…

then...

And it went on...

Somehow it led to kittens...

It was time to leave the table.

More Moments

More moments

1 in a 1000 Moments

Sometimes it is not about knowing how to take a decent photograph, but about having your camera ready at the right time and pressing that button just when you do. Sure, some planning will increase your chance of actually getting the shot, but it will always be just that, a chance.

Chance is something many people don’t get about the kind of photos I take. By no means do I qualify myself as a great photographer, but I do have some shots that show I am competent. That competence is something many other people have though and when they don’t, they can usually get it.

The tree photos in this post are from a sports day we had at school a few weeks back. I managed to take 1100 odd photos. I was able to discard 500 right off the bat and managed to get that down to about 160 that I thought was worth cropping, editing and sharing with the people at school.

Of those 160, there are maybe five that I really like and maybe five more that I think are a bit better than the rest. That is 10 photos out of 1000. 1000 photos where I got in to position and I pressed the button, hoping to get what I needed or wanted. I did not take my camera, point it at something just willy nilly and then expect every one of my 50 total photos to be usable.

Ansel Adams, one of the most recognised names in photography said:

“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.”

You can add to that what Henri Cartier-Bresson said:

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”

This first photo was taken at the rope jumping competition. They had three or four rounds, I don’t remember. These two were the last remaining students in their grade. I got myself a position so that I had both of them in the frame and waited for one to make a mistake. Every now and then I would press the button just in case it looked nice, and then it happened. The one boy made a mistake. He did not immediately realize what had happened, but as soon as I saw the mistake I had my finger on the shutter release and burst mode was firing. This was the exact moment where he realised that after all his hard work he was not the winner.

 

For the next two photos I got myself in position to look down the final straight. I was day-dreaming and didn’t get the moment it started, but I reacted quickly enough to get some of the complete scene.

The boy in white was on the final straight, way ahead of the rest. Finishing off the win for his team was just a formality. Something happened and he stumbled, falling with everyone looking. The student avoiding him did not seem to fully grasp what was happening until the second photo, when he was breaking the finishing line.

.

Just for fun

Friends

We were having a late lunch in a little restaurant in a traditional type market. Spice food for both of us. I’m not completely sure why I have this photo or what I was doing with the camera, because I don’t normally sit and take photos of the people at my table. The only time I do take photo of people at my table is when there is some sort of an occasion involved. Whatever the reason might be, when I went through my photos I had this one waiting for me. It is not perfect, but I really like it. Good job Jo was pretty much ignoring me and my camera.

Surprises

Sometimes looks are very deceiving.

And sometimes...

This is living

Close to Gecko’s at Haeundae Beach in Busan is what looks like a new bar. The place is all space and light and very glamorous looking. At one of the outside tables was a huge teddy that looked like it would make a nice photo. As I was trying to line up a shot one of the employees noticed and decided to help me out. He had obviously done this before and had Teddy set up in a laid back, life is great pose.

가을 (Autumn)

Autumn is in strange. You can go around for a month and take photos and you will get a few great ones, but there is this short window where everything just seems perfect.

I was going home from work a couple few weeks back and it suddenly struck me that the colour of the setting sun and the changing trees at Seoulbong Lake would be great for photos. I went by the lake instead of going straight home and indeed, the view was not bad.

I should have started monitoring the trees there about two weeks earlier, but every year I forget to do it. What I got was not amazing, but I feel that it is at east pleasing to look at.

Beach Front Bars

The mission to find relaxing places for food, caffeine and ethanol led us to Rock and Roll Club, or house, I’m not sure. It is a bar on the 14^th floor of a building right on the Haeundae beach front.

Orange

These are steps leading up to the aquarium at the 2012 Yeosu World Expo. I loved the colour of the wall. A group of 5 people dressed in white, grey and black would have looked great on this.

 

The Amazing Red Crab of Christmas Island (With Transcript)

00:36 Christmas Island is only around one hundred thirty five square kilometres and was named after the day of its discovery, December 25 1643, by captain William Mynors of the Royal Mary.

00:52 Christmas Island was formed by a series of geological uplifts.

00:58 The structure of the island is comparable to a wedding cake with the central plateau at two hundred meter above sea level and a number of cliffs and terraces descending to a rugged shoreline with few beaches.

01:13 Sixty three percent of the island is a protected Australian national park.

01:19 The park offers the perfect forest eco system for the Christmas Island red crab which is endemic to the Cocos Islands and Christmas Island, both in the Indian Ocean.

01:34 They try to keep a low profile under the forest canopy most of the year.

01:42 The annual Christmas Island crab migration is legendary. Each rainy season these crustaceans leave their inland burrows and head to the sea to spawn.

01:54 What makes this migration legendary is that the red crab is the most abundant of the fourteen species of land crabs on the island with an estimated one hundred twenty million inhabitants.

02:08 They will have to cross treacherous terrain, traffic, the risk of dehydration and the rocky battered shores.

02:21 The males lead the way and are joined by the females, but they won't mate until they reach their breeding terraces by the shore line.

** Created for Mrs 최현숙  at SongJong Middle School

Lets to the time warp again, or something.

“And of course, three weeks before the final exam, we are again disrupting classes by separating them into lower and higher level classes. It did not work last year, or the year before, or, yes, earlier this year, so maybe if we do it now, at some random point, just maybe it will work now.”

That was my reaction to what was going on at school, again.

Earlier this year the school tried this little mess of an idea. To be fair to the school, I’m fairly sure this is an Education Department decision. What you do is you separate the lower and higher level students, allowing teachers to teach a more uniform level of student. It is not a bad idea, given the right circumstances. We do not have the right circumstances.

The first problem is that they take two wildly different subjects, Mathematics and English, and divide students according to the average of the two. The first year the school did this I had a girl in the lower level class who lived in the US for a year and spoke near perfect English. When I asked her about it she said that she sucked at mathematics so was forced to go to lower level English. Hopefully Mathematics is easier to teach with 40 low levelled students, but I doubt it. This poor girl got screwed for both subjects.

The second problem is class size. Forty higher level students who put their heads down and do the work are great. What more could you want from a class. However, 40 little arseholes who are too lazy or too cool to study are impossible. Half of them never progressed past 3rd grade elementary school level and the rest, even if they do understand, are just not interested in working. You help one student and ask them to go on and the moment you turn your back they start talking and playing, and just in case you missed it the first time, there are forty of these monsters in the same class.

I don’t want this and more importantly none of the other teachers want this. I’m pretty sure many parents don’t want this either. The first time they tried this, it was started in the middle of a semester and they went back to normal in the middle of the next semester. I am saying middle, not beginning or end, but middle. Last year the same things happened. Earlier this year, when I heard we were doing this again I started laughing, explaining what would happen. My one co-teacher assured me that they would keep the separation. The order to change back to usual came a few weeks later.

Somehow, despite the recent failure, “we” are giving it a second try within the same year. It only took 20 minutes before I felt like seeing if my fist would draw blood from a face.

Table Art

Students are forever drawing things on their desks. More often than not they are just drawing rubbish, but every now and then there is a student who either uses the desk as a reusable canvas for their art, or just comes up with a great idea.

The first three images are of a drawing which uses the table’s bolts as elements. The skill of the drawings are not on the high side, but what is there is well done and oh so girly.

The next image is from a student who seemed to be working on a new character. I really love this style of art and just had to capture it before he erased it.

The last image was one that must have takes quite a bit of practice and time to create. Initially it was just cute, but after playing with Instagram I found this photo visually stunning.

Ball Hockey

A friend took me to a sport that I have never seen before. At first I thought it was just field hockey in an arena, Action Hockey if you will, but it turns out it was ice hockey with no ice, no protective gear and a orange ball. I was there for a very short time and would like to go back to get more photos, but I have no idea when I will get another chance.

The guys playing here are all from the US and Canadia. Teams are sponsored by various pubs in Seoul and more information about this league at Canada Ball Hockey Korea

Ah! Potatokie!

I would like to propose a new term to be exclaimed when one is surprised. The term, or word, is “Potatokie!”

My students, especially the girls, get frightened very easily. When they do they say “감자기” (Gamjahgi) Translated to English this means “suddenly” or “all of a sudden”. This of the students as saying “That was so sudden!”

To me it sounds alot like they are saying 감자, potato, but minimised the way Afrikaans way. Afrikaans allows one to turn any noun into a “small version” or pet name of itself by adding -ie, -kie, -tjie. Therefore a small potato, using Afrikaans grammar, will be a “Potatokie”

When something happens and give me a fright I can now exclaim “Potatokie!”

What does that button do?

On all but very basic cameras there are settings that you can, for the most part, change to your hearts content. Even most of the point and shoot like compact cameras can change settings like shutter speed and ISO. Most larger camera have a dial on the top right of the body with smaller cameras usually having the setting hidden somewhere in the menu systems.

Looking at a typical mode change dial you will usually see some modes represented by pictures and some by letters. The pictures are the Scene Modes designed for night photography, portraits, fireworks and the like.These can be quite useful, but once you understand the “Letter Modes” you will rarely need to use these scene modes.

Between these scene modes and manual modes, there is often an Auto Mode. Stay away from this. The only time you use this is when you hand the camera to someone who has never touched such a modern device.

This leaves us with the four lettered modes. These are only modes that we are really interested in. On Canon cameras these modes are marked with P, Tv, Av, and M. On Nikon cameras these are P, S, A, and M. Other cameras have their own variations, but the ideas are the same and easy to recognise. If it is in the menu system it might have a more descriptive name. There is also a button on many cameras to make it possible to quickly change your ISO level. If not, go menu system searching.

P Mode stands for Program Mode. For all intensive purposes P is just another Auto Mode. The camera does everything for you, but you are able to make some adjustments to the setting. Just like with full Auto Mode, you should stay away from this. It is not your friend.

S Mode on Nikon, Tv Mode on Canon, is Shutter Priority Mode. This lets you choose the shutter speed for your photos. The shutter speed determines how long your camera’s sensor or film is exposed to the light. That is the soft “click” sound you hear when you take a photo. When you look through your viewfinder or at your display on the back of the camera you will see your shutter speed displayed. It is usually a number displayed as 1 over something, e.g.. 1/30 or 1/250. This means that the shutter will be open for one 30th of a second or one 250th of a second. The larger the bottom number the faster the shutter will open and close. When the shutter speed is shown as a small number with what looks like a starting quotation mark next to it e.g.. 2”, it means that the shutter will be open in full seconds rather than fractions. In this case larger numbers mean slower shutter speeds.

Why would you care about this mode? Because this mode is useful when you are trying to capture motion. Those evening photos where cars rush by leaving the lines of light all over the image are done by leaving the shutter open longer. In other words, a slow shutter creates movement, blur and shake. Shake is bad. To avoid it most people shoot normal daylight photography comfortably at 1/30 shutter speed. Action, like sport, are often shot at about 1/250. It is a little more complicated than that, but this is not the place to discuss that.

A Mode on Nikon, Av Mode on Canon, is the Aperture Priority Mode. Most photographers seem to prefer this mode as it is easy to change aperture for full control over depth of field and knock-on control of shutter speed. A camera’s aperture is the size of the hole that allows light into the camera. The bigger the hole, the more light comes in to the camera. Usually this is very easy to change. Once you are in Aperture Priority Mode you usually have a wheel on the camera body to turn and change the setting. In your viewfinder or on your screen the Aperture will be represented by a “f”or ”F” followed by a number, eg. F8.0 or F2.8. Because of the f many people prefer to call this the F-Stop. Confusingly the smaller number means a larger aperture.

Aperture is very useful for “artistic” reasons because it is what you use to adjust Depth of Field, the focus area. Basically, a small large aperture Depth of Field mean a small area of the photo will be in focus and a large area will seem blurry. A small aperture will put most of the photo in focus.

Why would you care about this? Let us say you are trying to photograph someone, but you don’t really want to see all the people in the background. Set your camera to have a large aperture, a small F number. When you focus on the person, the background will be mostly blurred and the focus is taken of those people in the back completely. If you are taking a photo of a landscape then you want everything to be in focus, right? This is where you will use a small aperture, or a large number.

M Mode is the full Manual Mode and is not really as difficult as it sounds. It just lets you change what you already change in A and S modes. The biggest issue with this mode is that it takes time to set up your camera. With varying lighting situations like you might have while walking outside, this might not be the easiest mode to shoot in. This mode is good for cameras on tripods or in studios.

The last setting you need to worry about it your ISO. All this does is change your camera’s sensitivity to light. A higher ISO makes your camera more sensitive to light and you can therefore shoot photos in darker situations. In clubs, for instance, you need your camera to be very sensitive to light. More sensitive cameras mean brighter photos. Easily done because we can just bump up the ISO. The problem is that those club photo always seem like they are lower quality than that daylight photos. That is because a more sensitive camera picks up stray light and electrons which cause photos to look grainy. As a rule of thumb you try to keep your ISO as low as possible.

How do you know what your ISO should be? The best indication is your shutter speed. If it is too slow then your photos will be blurry. Keep pushing the ISO up until your you get 1/30 for normal photo or faster if movement is involved.

 

“Cheat Sheet” Aperture ( F Stop) Mode: Small numbers give out of focus background for portraits and single objects Large numbers for everything in focus like street photos or landscapes Shutter Speed Mode: Very slow 2” for lights at night Medium 1/30 - 1/50 for hand held everyday photos Fast 1/250 for action photography ISO: Is your shutter speed to slow? Increase the ISO number. Reset it to ISO100 when you are done

 

** I was hoping to have time to write multiple shorter posts that do not jam everything down in one read. Alas, it can’t be so. I will eventually rewrite this post and split it up into descriptions of each mode.

Ussher Creation

According to James Ussher, a prolific Church of Ireland scholar from Ireland the world was created on this day in 4004BC.

This date was part of the Chronology that he created based on the Proleptic Julian calendar. At the time such a calculation was an amazing feat that required great knowledge of the history of various civilizations as well as knowledge of other sciences.

Today, however, we know that he was hopelessly wrong. It does not stop many a Christian to claim that the world was indeed created about 6000 years ago, with no idea who came up with the idea or how.

It does not matter which camp you may fall in, the fact remains that this is a date worth celebrating because what is more important, the birth of your insignificant self, the founding of your soon to die country or the creation of the world? I say we party like it is 6016.

Rule Number Three

The last of my Three Rules for photography concerns positioning. This might be the single most mysterious thing that will make your photo look better than those of people around you. Getting decent light or knowing how to use aperture will help, but even with those perfect, if your positioning sucks then the photo will somehow look, off.

At the core positioning is really easy, and once you grasp it you will understand that you should always consider it and when to throw rules out the window. The execution takes practice and everyone gets it wrong, often. The Rule of Thirds says that there are certain lines and points within a frame that are more important for overall balance than other points. Google “Rule of Thirds” and you will get lists of articles, books and examples going into  great detail, the kind of detail I will not go in to because you have better things to do with your time than sit here all day wondering what on earth I am trying to say.

To make things easy, go play with your camera setting. Most cameras have a function that adds lines on your display helping you use the rule of thirds. In the photo above, a screenshot from my phone, you can see these lines .

The horizontal lines are good for horizons and shore lines. Put the horizon on the top line and the waves breaking non the bottom line and you have a nicely spaced photo.

The vertical lines are very useful for placing people in scenes and for placing tall objects in a frame.

The intersections of the four lines are slightly more complicated. Those are the points you use for very specific focal points in the photo. For a portrait shot, those are useful when positioning the eyes in the frame. When you take a photo of a flower say, place the bud or bloom on one of these points with the stem crossing the photo.

Another possibly obvious use of these lines on your camera is to use them to keep your photos straight. Look at lines on walls, or at the horizon? Is your photo lining up with the lines? No? Then make it so!

Time to stop thinking about invisible lines and start thinking about stuff. Let just imagine you are taking a photo of a group of people posing. Before you even lift your camera, look at the scene. Look to the sides and above the group. Do you have space to work with? Is there anything in that space that you don’t need, like a screaming toddler? Look at the background. Will it interfere with the photo? Strange lines, too dark, too bright, people hanging from trees? Everything clean there?

Although using The Rule is also considered composition, I personally think, the checking of the surrounding, when I hear composition. This is where you take charge. Punt that toddler to the side. Mark those people in the trees with a BB gun. Make everyone move to get a better background. You  have the power, use it while you can.

Of the three rules this one takes the most practice and effort. You might have to climb some stairs, or heaven forbid walk three paces to the right to make your photo just so, but in the end, it will be worth it

* This is the second post in a series, with Rule Number One  and Rule Number Two here.