Late last year I delivered a presentation to the Napels Mac Friends MUG (NMUG) focused on shooting great photos with an iPhone. That presentation was primarily focused on the craft of smartphone photography, and part of that presentation was re-worked into episode 145 of this show, titled ‘Back to Basics’. Within days of that talk the group approached me with a request to submit a proposal for a follow-up presentation this year, and gave me the freedom to expand my focus beyond the more practical craft of shooting with an iPhone into broader concepts around the art of photography. I jumped at the chance, and developed a presentation titled ‘The Art of Composition’ which I delivered a few weeks ago. As always with this wonderful group, I had a blast!

The NMUG presentation was extremely visual, with the vast majority of the slides dedicated to example images with annotations tying them back to some general principles and guidelines. Something I always try to do when designing any presentation is build it around a coherent narrative. In this case, the narrative started with a descriptions of my guiding principles for my particular photographic style, and then made the point not to confuse principles with guidelines. Both are valuable, but while sticking to your principle is important, guidelines are always optional — use them when they’re helpful, and ignore them when they’re not! But feel free to go further than just ignoring guidelines, when you understand their intent, you might find that intentionally inverting them is extremely effective! Finally, only after making this important distinction did the presentation move on to describing some of the principles I find useful when composing my images.

Rather than traditional show notes, this episode is accompanied by an abridged version of my slide deck, retaining just the presentations narrative arc.

Download the Abridged version of the Presentation (PDF)

If you’d like to see the full presentation, with all the examples images, why not consider joining the Naples Mac Friends? They may be based in Naples Florida, but they’re a truly international bunch, and their membership is wide open. The group were kind enough to gift me a membership as a token of appreciation, and I’ve really enjoyed watching their presentations from the other side of the Atlantic ocean!