Photographic or Graphic Composition Courses

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Can anyone recommend any good online courses that cover image composition? I’m not talking vfx comping but stuff like golden ratios, leading lines, etc.

I want to get hold of some good resources that i can hand to my colleagues to help them refine their eye.

Doesn’t matter if it’s free or paid for…as long as its good!

Thanks
Adam

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I second this. I have some folks that could really use this and the googling has brought up very little except some udemy videos by content creators.

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Definitely. I’m not sure if a course or book really embeds that in your brain though? May not work for those folks - but take a basic photography composition class. Even one where you just use your iPhone.

Way back in 2008? I took two photography classes that were fantastic. Both on the river walk in Savannah with a photographer who was also a great teacher. For one week we’d spend the morning photographing an assignment, then edit in Lightroom over lunch, and in the afternoon sit at the hotel and he would do a critique of everyone’s work with a great group discussion. Then you got to iterate over that for a few more days. And opposite of tech gadgetry. We’d go out with one camera, one lens.

And for many years I worked very closely with a fantastic graphic designer on numerous projects, and we’d go back and forth - him in Illustrator trying things, me helping put that into websites. And we did a few book layouts. Learning about balance and negative space, typography, etc. Priceless.

You can’t replace how actually doing it internalizes things. Especially today where we have so much information fly by us all day. It just doesn’t adhere when there’s no sweat equity involved.

I know that doesn’t solve your problem… Just think that sending some an online course link or a book isn’t sticking.

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Not sure about a course but the book THE FILMMAKER’S EYE is informative and inspiring

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I agree totally, better to do at the side of a master, but that’s not really doable in a busy work environment.
I asked about online purely because i know finding any kind of photography course near our base will be extremely challenging. I try pass on my knowledge but its not always easy when deadlines loom.

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Thanks Greg…that looks a damn good buy!

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I have a few books I can suggest that were beneficial to me in my education:

  1. Art and Visual Perception by Rudolf Arnheim. Arnheim was a Harvard professor who taught the Psychology of Art. The book covers gestalt principles of art, each chapter focusing on a different topic (balance, shape, form, space, light, color, movement, etc.) It’s definitely a tome book, chock full of evergreen information. But can be a bit dry and a bit of a slog like working your way through a 1974 college textbook (because you are, ha!)

  2. The Visual Story by Bruce Block. Block takes the same approach as Arnheim and breaks down these principles in dedicated chapters, however it is focused exclusively for film/tv/video media. Lots of color images and visual analysis of frames from Spielberg, Scorsese, Tarantino, etc. I found it more relevant and more digestible, but Arnheim establishes the concepts more throughly.

  3. The Art and Science of Digital Compositing by Ron Brinkmann is a classic book of compositing principles. I mention it here as he has an early chapter literally titled “Learning to See” to help freshmen compositors better develop their visual aesthetic chops.

Hope that helps!

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