Composition with Martin Edge.

[TimIngmire]

I spent this weekend back down in Bournemouth on a 2 day course with Martin Edge. Unlike the previous course this was a group course; besides me there were two others on the course which made things very cosy. We also had another photographer (and prior ME student) who was documenting the course for a write-up for Sport Diver magazine.

The course started promptly at 9:00 on Saturday morning with a quick review of everybodies objectives and then we were off doing a range of excerises in the room and also out and around the local area. This took us until lunch when we were off to a local pool for the wet exercises trying to put into effect the things we had learnt. I had the opportunity to try out a Nikon 105mm macro lens and, despite a short period getting used to the different handling compared to my 60mm, I really enjoyed playing with the lens. The objective was to produce a portfolio of at least 5 different images which demonstrated the key design principles behind good compostion - we would review these on the Sunday. After 2 hours in the pool I had just 20 images and out of that I only had 5 that I was happy with.

Sunday morning started off with a review of each portfolio as well as a review of the dry photos we had taken in the earlier exercises. This was an excellent opportunity to really see and grasp the how different people like and appreciate different things. We all showed things that the rest had just walked on by yet produced some great pictures. All this was interspersed with slide shows from Martin demonstrating different concepts and principles of good and bad composition.

Sunday afternoon was another opportunity to put all this into practice with real life fish life - including sharks, free swimming Morays, reef fish and even a couple of turtles! Yep, we spent the afternoon at the local aquarium which was just a few minutes walk from the hotel. The session proved to be a real test and showed how difficult it is to get good composition with real subjects moving at speed. All too often I found myself (as did all of us) chasing subjects to get the shot - suffice to say it never really worked and Martin showed us a few techniques which would help get much better images, but even then it was still difficult to get anything like a pleasing result.


I found this to be a great weekend and learnt a lot. Putting it all into practice with other photographers with totally different preferences was a valuable experience.

[Jules]

So where are the piccies then? give us an idea what you learnt...

[TimIngmire]

OK, these are the pictures from the pool. These were taken with the Nikon 105mm lens which was the first time that I had used it - took a little getting used to after using only the 60mm micro lens.

[TimIngmire]

I've these and some of my other pictures up on flickr - just pop along to:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ingmire/sets/1393659/

[Jules]

Very nice tim!