Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.
Those in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones, but they do cast their fair share of reflections. Perched above the street in one of Minneapolis’ many skyways, my eye was caught by the reflection on the skyway window, but I quickly saw the reflections all down the street and saw the chance to capture myself in the act.
Composition Tips
Here’s a few tips on composing an image: The rule of thirds is a classic and oft debated, but good general rule. Divide the space into thirds in both directions and try to place areas of interest on the intersections or along the lines. For example, you can see that I placed my head at the intersection of the left and bottom thirds, then the horizon on the bottom third and the dark shape of the building above my head is on the left third. Centering subjects is really boring for the eye. Also, if you have a person or critter in the scene, try to leave room in front of them, like the way I turned myself to be facing into the image.
A Scientific Study on Composition
I’ve been running this daily photo blog for almost 6 months now and have been keeping track of it with Google Analytics (one of the benefits of designing your own blog). Google Analytics offers a tremendous amount of information, for example, I could look at a chart of how many visitors came from the City Daily Photo Blog on each day. I was looking at this and saw a large swing the the number of visitors each day. If you aren’t familiar with the CDPB, it shows thumbnails of photos from the participating blogs. The neat thing about this is that each of my daily photos appears there as a thumbnail along with 16 other photos on the page. This gives me a simple way to ‘test’ an image to see if people will pick it out as interesting enough to take a closer look. I looked at the top and bottom traffic-getting images and discovered a number of relationships.
The lowest traffic photos all had one thing in common, the horizon was dead-center. I know that this makes an image boring, but in some cases, it made sense. For example, this image from Feb 20th:
I explain the reason for the composition on that day’s post and my friend Paul says this is his favorite photo of all the ones I have placed on the blog. But that day I only got three visitors from the CDPB; compare that to 13 the day before and 23the day after. The five lowest ranking days all had dead-center horizons. Some were daytime, some were night. One didn’t have a traditional horizon, but there was a prominent horizontal line across the center of the image.
It was an amazing realization to me. One of the most exhausting elements of art school is all the cookie-cutter rebels that bring to class these two-dimensional tragedies and then proceed to explain why they are “breaking the rules.” I was doing the same thing with these images. Like a bad idea in the free market, nobody tells you why it’s bad, they just don’t buy it. So in the same way, nobody clicks on the photos with a centered horizon.
So when you look through the lens, move around a little, recompose and take a few shots. When you place the horizon, move it off center. If you want to rebel against the man, go for it, but save the rebellion for the subject matter. The more well-composed and interesting the composition, the more people will be drawn to the image itself, regardless of the content.
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I understand what you are saying about rule of thirds and composition. Sometimes something catches our eyes and we break these rules. At the time, that moment and thought were captured. I have done this very thing countless times. But months later, I go back and review, I ask myself, “what was I thinking”? Moment lost, inspiration gone. I am looking at my “rebellious” pic as a viewer and not as the artist. I fogot what it was that captured my thought process.
Thank you for this reminder. I know I have become complacent with my photos. Must be the weather.
This and your related discussions are very interesting. It sounds like a lot of work, though, to go through your pictures day by day, checking the number of hits and referral sources. I have a Google Analytics account but I don’t use it very much. It seems complicated and I don’t always understand the statistics. I check Statcounter much more often because the interface seems simpler. It’s interesting that they don’t come up with exactly the same number of visitors per day, etc. Is there a particular report in GA that you use?
An interesting trend I have noticed is the ratio of visitors per day to comments. Since I’ve been around for a year, the number of hits per day has been gradually rising. Google Analytics tells me that general searches in that engine are easily the largest source of visitors. Referrals from blogger.com and the CDPB portal are close together at second and third. I noticed that GA says that I had 163 visits yesterday while StatCounter says that I had 126 unique visitors and 216 page loads. However, there were no comments and this is becoming common. I was thinking of posting the previous day’s visits to comments ratio with each post but then I decided it wasn’t worth the bother. What has your experience been?
Strange-
Google Analytics is the most accurate, I don’t know why the other counter is lower. When I talk with my clients about it, I call it SoberStats, since it gives you Unique Visitors, it’s numbers are usually lower than all other counters, but much more, well, sober.
There are so many reports and I find them all interesting is some way. I haven’t looked at stats vs. comments, I see the comments as being related to the content of my post — oddly the more I write, the fewer comments I get. People must get tired of reading my yammer. Other times I think they are intimidated if the first comment from someone is very detailed. It’s hard to write ‘cool pic!’ after a great analysis from you or Paul
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