Mastering Composition – Border Patrol

Your photograph’s borders are key elements to a strong composition. What goes on there can make or break the image. Read about just one consideration to take into account when composing your photographs.

“When I compose an image I spend more time getting the borders right than I spend on the subject.”  You think this is a surprising statement?  There are a lot of photographers that I really admire for whom this statement is true.  I know when I first started out I had no idea what was happening on the borders.  I paid no attention to them.  Until it was pointed out to me that my borders were very sloppy.  And from that point on composition got a whole lot harder because getting clean borders is not a trivial task.  But over time it became second nature to me.  Now I always check the borders and make appropriate adjustments before I press the shutter.

Well, almost always.  Take a look….

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Lightroom Tutorial – Workflow Made Easy

Simplify your Lightroom workflow with these easy steps.

Lightroom is a great tool. It’s quick and easy to use – once you get the hang of it. But sometimes mastering the workflow, the steps you go through to take a raw file to a ‘final’ image, can be a bit daunting.

Let me say up front that Lightroom is an important part of my workflow but it’s not the only part.  Every photograph I work on starts in Lightroom but is completed in Photoshop.  Nevertheless, Lightroom gets a photograph to about 80% of the final product.  I know many people who use Lightroom exclusively and Photoshop only in rare circumstances if at all.

So back to the workflow.  Can it really be made easy?  Yes it can.  There are four major steps (not counting import – see Lightroom Tutorial – Importing Photographs):

  1. Mechanical adjustments like dust spot removal and cropping
  2. Tonality adjustments
  3. Hue adjustments
  4. Saturation adjustments

Let’s skip the first step and start with the second.  The example will be in Lightroom 4.

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