Composition

Shooting position

Surprisingly, good photographic composition is determined not by any extra gadgets or eguipment, but by the photographer’s choice of shooting position and the type of lens used to take the shot. Most of us shoot all our photographs from a standing position, limiting the resulting pictures to the same viewpoint and perspective.

More dynamic effects can be achieved if your viewpoint is varied to a worm’s eye or bird’s eye view, which will pull and push the subject shapes into much more interesting designs. Shooting flat on at standing height will create less interesting results because it is the way we see the world with our own eyes. Great photographs are those that offer us the chance to see the world in a different light.

Cropping in camera

The first golden rule of composition is to shoot more than one version of your subject. If you’re ever in doubt about how best to frame your scene, then shoot a few variations, which you can edit down at a later stage. It’s difficult tojudge on location whether you’ve captured the best facet of your subject or chosen the right viewpoint.

Always shoot a portrait and landscape variation of your subject and, if your camera has a zoom lens, shoot both a wide and close-up version. Always leave a generous border around your image so any software cropping can be made without compromising the important contents of your photograph.

Symmetry

A balanced and well proportioned photograph defines the simplest of all compositional techniques: symmetry. If you can picture an imaginary fold across your photo in either a top-to-bottom or side-to-side arrangement, then you can already visualize symmetry. Great for creating harmonious images, a symmetrical design can be applied to most situations to create order. Landscapes and still-life subjects work well with a symmetrical approach, and can be made to look much less random and more thought out.

Scenes that flow naturally from foreground into background can be further improved if you can weave some elements of your image into a vista view. Just like a diminishing railway line, road or other feature, the vista forms a tight visual link between foreground and background.

Rule of thirds

Used by artists and draughtsmen over the centuries, the ancient rule of thirds offers a very structured way to organise your photographs. The rule dictates that an image should be divided into nine egual sections, using two horizontal and two vertical lines. The most important elements of your picture should be arranged at the intersections of these lines. If you imagine an invisible grid within your image, you can easily make this work for you. If you can lock the main elements of your image onto any one of these points, an effective and striking composition is pretty much guaranteed. Like all rules, there’s no need to use the rule of thirds for all shots, but if you’re stuck for ideas, try this out for size.

Faced with the prospect of an uninteresting or potentially distracting background, try adjusting your shooting position until the background is removed entirely. Best done by shooting from a raised position, this kind of composition flattens out the landscape into a more patterned design rather than a three-dimensional space.

Foreground-only compositions are much easier to shoot if you use your zoom lens at its widest angle setting (but be careful of other elements creeping into the background by mistake). This kind of effect can really isolate and emphasize the best bits of your scene, and is great for making compositions based on a common colour scheme or emphasize a repeated pattern or texture.

Filling empty spaces

When looking at any photographic image, the human eye is drawn to various parts of the picture where emphasis is placed. In a successful photograph, this means that the most important element gets the most attention, but in a clumsy composition the eye is drawn to empty or blank spaces by accident. To prevent this disaster from occurring, there are many tactics that you can use to cover up empty space, such as moving your own position or changing to a tighter telephoto crop.

Out on location, a favourite trick is to drape overhanging branches into your shot, by shooting from under the canopy of a nearby tree. With focus still set o your main subject in the distance, overhanging branche: offer a simple way to fill up empty space and provide a kind of subliminal pointer that forces the eye down fron the top of the frame. Dark shapes and fringes help to force your attention onto lighter and more central parts of the photograph, so this is an effective tactic when faced with a white sky.

Lens framing

Very different kinds of composition can be made by using lenses of variable focal length. If your digital camera has a built-in zoom lens, then you have the option to compose with both a long telephoto or a shorter wide-angle setting. The long telephoto lens can be used to great effect for making background-only compositions, created by overlapping distant objects into a single, snug-fitting frame. Telephoto shots are not easy to see at first because of their distance away from your immediate surroundings, but you will start to spot potential shots by looking through the lens itself. Even minute changes in your shooting position will result in a significant compositional change, so you must stabilize your own position, or use a tripod. Wide-angle lenses offer a different kind of control by creating a much more three-dimensional space to arrange your image elements. Difficult to use if you want to blur out background with a shallow depth of field, the wide-angle lens is better used when confronted with confined spaces or when you need to pack in large groups of people.

Panoramic crop

There’s no rule that states that all photographs should be rectangular and in the horizontal format. Although this shape probably accounts for 90 per cent of all photographs ever taken, you can improve a composition by making a radical shape change. When faced with difficult shooting situations, a simple technigue is to crop away the empty areas using your image-editing package to make a more dynamic shape. The panoramic format offers a spectacular shape that can be used with landscape subjects where blank space top and bottom can be removed. With a simple use of the Crop tool, the long, thin letterbox shape is an effective way to improve a group portrait.

Powering up takes just two seconds, so the Panasonic’s ready to use in no time at all. The lens pops out from behind a protective metal shield – not quite as robust and practical as a sliding lens cover, but better than the flimsy interlocking leaves that some other cameras use – or lenscaps that you forget to take off, or lose.

The LCD display measures just 1.5 inches across the diagonal, but with 114,000 pixels, it’s very sharp and clear, particularly in bright outdoor lighting, where many other displays can tend to struggle. Focusing typically takes around half a second. The Panasonic and all its immediate rivals are now very close in this respect and it’s hard to split them. The zooming action’s a bit lethargic, but it’s precise too, so that it’s quite easy to get the zoom ratio you want without too much hunting backwards and forwards.

Even the optical viewfinder is good. Taken at face value, the size of the viewfinder eyepiece on the backplate looks too small to be of any real use, but that’s not the case. It’s well-positioned, too, and easy to put your eye to. The good news carries into the controls. The main mode dial on the top plate is especially good. You can use this to set all the Panasonic’s various scene modes, for a start. These include Macro, Portrait, Landscape and Night Portrait options, plus an Easy mode which supplements the normal program AE shooting mode. The dial also has a setting for Playback mode. Having all this on one dial is much better than having to hunt around on the menus.

On the back, Panasonic Lumix DMC-F1 uses a good-sized four-way navigational controller which provides shortcut functions in shooting mode. You press Left to activate the self-timer, for example, which can be set to either ten seconds or two seconds. Pressing Down activates a quick review mode for checking the last shot taken – very handy. You press Right to change the flash mode, and the options here include a slow sync mode. It’s when you press Up, though, that the Panasonic reveals just how well thought out its design is. Pressing up once activates the EV compensation option, and you can now press left or right to reduce or increase the exposure. If you press Up twice instead of once, though, you get the Panasonic’s auto-bracket function. This is unexpected in what’s ostensibly a point-and-shoot camera, and an indication that the Lumix is likely to appeal to more experienced users, too.

Unfortunately, you have to delve into the menus to change the bracketing amount, but it’s not a major drawback. Overall, the Lumix F1’s control layout is very impressive indeed. And while the battery life expectancy doesn’t look particularly impressive on paper, the Panasonic’s lithium-ion cell holds up well – plus, it recharges in just 90 minutes.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-F1 Features and quality

The Panasonic’s slick and practical. It’s also pretty well-featured. You can swap to a spot metering mode via the menus, choose Natural, Standard or Vivid colour for your shots, add audio annotations both when you take your shots and afterwards to shots already saved, and you can even resize and crop pictures on the memory card. There are even 2fps and 4fps burst modes.

The Panasonic does rely on its menus for many of its options, but they are very clear and easy to navigate. The only problem is that as you choose an item it expands to show the options available. This changes the appearance of the on-screen display and it’s quite disorientating.

Our only other complaint would be the movie mode. The resolution’s unspectacular at 320 x 240 pixels, and the frame rate is lower than that of most rival cameras, at just 10fps. But there’s certainly nothing to complain about with the still image quality. The colour balance is occasionally a little wayward, but only by small amounts you wouldn’t notice unless you had other cameras to compare it with directly, as we have.

Otherwise, shots are contrasty saturated and extremely vivid. Miniature film cameras often bring some loss of image quality due to design compromises, but digital cameras – especially Panasonic Lumix DMC-F1 – seem to bring no such problems. You can buy this digital camera secure in the knowledge that you’re not sacrificing any image quality in exchange for its slimline design.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-F1 is a very nice, very well-made digital camera. It’s compact and stylish with a great control layout.