While there are techniques for creating panoramic photographs (which we??™ll
cover in Chapter 14), most of the time this is not the kind of shot we take.
Nope??”our job as photographers is to take the panorama that we see with our own eyes and
translate it into an attractive photograph using the laws of photographic composition. As you
can see in Figure 4-1, there??™s often more than one way to frame a picture; it??™s really your job to
decide which works best for the kind of photograph you are trying to achieve. In this situation
I had an extremely rare opportunity to photograph endangered monk seals, so I shot many
different compositions.
Rules of Composition
For a few pages now I have been alluding to the rules of composition. I hope that you??™re curious
about what they might be. In truth, the rules of composition are no more rigid than rules of
etiquette or the rules of web page design. Certainly, those rules can be important, but they??™re
simply guidelines to help us get the job done. If you violate any of these rules, nothing awful
72 How to Do Everything: Digital Camera
happens (unless you??™re still living at home when you break the rules of etiquette). And that??™s why
you??™ll be able to break these rules later on. To begin with, however, you need to learn the rules
and apply them.
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