(This piece has been lying idle in my drafts since two or three months back. I’ve finally decided to post it on a cool Sunday evening, with the past summer a not-so-distant memory.)

The word study, as a noun, means (among other definitions):

• a piece of work, esp. a drawing, done for practice or as an experiment.
• a musical composition designed to develop a player’s technical skill.

Another definition:

• A preliminary sketch, as for a work of art or literature.

It’s not that I’m aspiring to come up with a work of art, but the great thing about digital cameras (as stressed in numerous photography blogs) is that you can practice, practice and practice taking pictures without having to worry about film printing costs.

Here, I fiddled around with choosing the target focus areas (left, center, and right) available in most dslr cameras (those red bracket pairs you see in the viewfinder) for taking photos of these red and white bougainvillaea flowers. (Still life subjects like flowers are usually very obliging; they tend to cooperate quite well for photoshoots. How’s that for stating the obvious? He he…)

Anyway, if you’re an amateur photog like me, you probably and usually stick to focusing on subjects with the center area active. Quite understandable; it’s easy and convenient. On the other hand, using the off-center focus areas (left or right) gives you a chance to play around with the oft-mentioned Rule of Thirds in composing a picture.

So here we go with my “studies” of the papery-thin flowers of these ubiquitous ornamental plants most Antipolo residents tend to take for granted. They’re quite digitally photogenic (I think); I was especially surprised when I discovered the diaphanous character of the red ones only after I viewed the pics on my laptop:

If you’re familiar with the Rule of Thirds and are tired of it, you might want to consider applying a more surprising approach with the Fibonacci spiral in mind. Note though that even the author of that post admits that the images he exhibits were “happy accidents” since he hadn’t planned beforehand in making the “major parts of the composition fall along major intersections or lines within the (Fibonacci) spiral.” Go figure.

Whatever your focusing preference may be, just remember that it costs practically next to nothing to shoot lots of digital photos for polishing your compositional skills!

Posted in: Better Earth, Photo Gallery | Comments(0) | July 2009