Composition Tutorial (Part 2, Perspective, Leading Lines, Balance and Implied Movement)
Photography is an art as well as a science, and in any art beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What I'm presenting here are guidelines to help you take better photographs, not rules that must be followed. You're the one with your eye to the viewfinder and your finger on the shutter button, so you must decide what works best for you. Practicing these techniques will help you to get good results more often, but you should try to adapt them to your own style and artistic preferences.
Perspective
Perspective is all around us, and so naturally we take it for granted. It’s what gives us our perception of three dimensions and makes the difference between cows that are very small, and cows that are a long way away. That's more than a gratuitous Father Ted reference by the way. Indians living deep in the Amazon jungle, where the most distant thing they can see is only a few meters away, have been found to have no sense of perspective. When they come out of the jungle for the first time, they see distant objects not as being far away, but as being very small. It takes some time for their brains to adjust to a perspective view.
In photography, we can use perspective in a number of ways to achieve different effects. Most types of perspective shots are best achieved using wide-angle lenses, since the angle of view tends to emphasise perspective by making nearer objects appear larger than they are, and more distant ones appear even smaller. This is why they're a bad choice for close-up portraits, unless you're a fan of giant noses....."
