[MUSIC] Welcome back everyone. This is where we're going to start putting things together. Kind of exciting. Composition, and we're going to talk about composition, map making, and bicycle riding too. Let's get going. Well, here's a map of my route on the Michigan State University Campus from the Kresge Art Center to the office of someone else that you know at Michigan State, the Dean of the college of Arts and Letters, Professor Chris Long. You'll remember him from the really nice introduction that he gave to this specialization. And the fact that he's an avid photographer himself. A map gives us direction. It leads us to a conclusion, a place where the person who put the map together is guiding us. This 1831 map of the territory of Michigan before it became a state bares some resemblance to the contours of the actual land mass, but this would not have been the most accurate guide to certain areas back then. Although it was the best at the time. Maps have to be accurate. They have to be put together with care. So that the people who depend on them will get to where they're intended to go. At one time, in the not so distant past, the art and craft of map making was a very highly regarded occupation because the people who made them had to pay attention to details. They had to understand the user and understand what that user might be expected to understand of the map itself. They had to know about space and time and how to convey visual information through visual elements. In other words, they had to have an artist with inclinations. Creating a composition for a visual image, for a photograph for example, is very much like creating that map. We have to pay attention to details. We have to understand what the purposes of our image is, where we want the viewer to go both literally, as they move through the picture, and figuratively in terms of concepts to be conveyed. We also need to understand our viewer, who is probably a lot like us, and how they may respond to the signals that we share, and the guidelines that we create. You've had an introduction to the visual elements, and to the concept of visual weight. Both of which are critically important to understand as you begin to make more purposeful compositions. You should pick a few to concentrate on for a certain number of photographs, and make pictures with a purpose. That purpose must not only be in terms of the subject, in other words, what the picture is about. But it must also be in terms of the map making that will guide the view to the visual elements through which you are conveying your content. Even when that content is as simple as how beautifully designed the resort you're visiting in Cancun, Mexico is. You'll communicate it so much more effectively when you have a purposeful path for the viewer to follow. In order to be a good map maker, you not only need to know about the elements that you're going to put together to create the path, you also need to know about visual weight. Somewhat like knowing how to render landmarks on a map that will be attractive to the viewer and give them some sense of significance. Well why am I illustrating this with photographs of people making snapshots in the fantastic location of Times Square in New York City? Well, it's because I imagine, although I do not know for sure, that the last thing that was on their mind, was things like shape, and form, and texture, tone, visual weight, and so forth. You however, if you ever get to visit that place of fantasy and reality all jumbled up together, you'll be making pictures not just taking them. The last thing we need to address in this lesson relates to riding a bicycle. Now, perhaps you learned how to ride a bike when you were a child. Or later in life. But as anyone who knows how to ride a bike can tell you. Once you learn, it's like swimming. It becomes intuitive and you really never forget how to do it. The same thing can be said for using the skills that you're developing in terms of these visual elements and composition. Once you learn them, you're going to make use of them intuitively. It will become second nature to you to use them in your photography. In fact, you'll understand that if you were to forget those skills, just as with a bicycle, your pictures would crash. There's something else that relates bicycle riding to the act of being intentional. In creating successful compositions, and that is an aspect that we call just simply keeping your balance so that the bike doesn't crash. Take a look at the English cyclist Harry Wheeler who was a famous bloke in the late 1800s. If you have ridden a bike before, you know, that in order for the bike not to crash, while you're riding straight ahead, you must keep just about exactly the same weight on each side of the center line of the bicycle. Just like Harry's doing here. What happens when you make a turn on a bike? Well think about it. If you're sitting down now, hold your hands out as if you were on a bike, and think about what you would do to turn around a corner, maybe to turn left. You'd tilt the bike and your lower body to the left. While you tilted your upper body to the right to counterbalance it. I'm going in both directions here. In that situation, you do not have exactly the same body parts balanced on either side of the bike like you would if you're riding straight ahead, far from it. Pictorial composition can be thought of in the same simplified terms. For a symmetrical composition such as this one, we're riding that bicycle straight ahead. [SOUND] With just about exactly the same amounts of types of body parts or picture elements on either side of the center line. And asymmetrical composition like this one, for my fore into Times Square, does not have the same things on either side of that center line. Whether that lines is dividing the picture in half vertically, or horizontally. There's another balance happening in such pictures. Balance that does not have to do with the physical shifting of weight, as we do when we are turning on a bicycle. It has to do instead with shifting the visual weight to create a balance. Do you see how much visual weight that single isolated woman has? And how it's so great that she can balance all the lights and action and color and pattern on the left hand side. Now I hope a little light bulb is going on over your head And, that you're getting excited about putting the theoretical information that I've been sharing on good composition to good use. Let's move on to the next lesson, and I'll share some common theories on, so called, good composition.
