United Breaks Guitars

United Breaks Guitars 2

So what happens after these videos hit the web? Dave becomes an instant celebrity and along with invitations to perform both songs he is invited to give talks about customer service.  So when a customer service software company asked Dave Carroll to come to Colorado Springs and give a speech to their employees, he had to fly United again…and then they lost his luggage.

What is Composition?

Easy. Composition is simply the arrangement of elements in the frame. How things in your photo are arranged determines how people will view your photo and more importantly how long people will look at your photo. Think about it, the longer someone looks at your photo, the better the photo. Have you ever gotten your prints back from a roll of film? (I know, I know we’re all digital now, just work with me) You flip through your prints and quickly pass the bad and the boring, but you linger over the ones you like. Even if only for a fraction of a second longer. So your goal with taking better pictures is to get people, even if that person is just yourself, to look at your pictures longer. Start with fractions of a second longer and work your way up to full seconds, then minutes, then hours and all the way up to a full semester of college students pondering how you captured the meaning of life in a black and white photo of a weed in your backyard. It could happen. So the question becomes ‘how do I use composition to make people look at my photos longer? Good question.

Mr. Sulu, you have the Con.

Step one. Take control of your photos. Up until now you probably just pointed the camera in the general direction of what you want to take a picture of and pushed the shutter button. No more, from now on you are going to think about what you are pointing at and you will begin to see that everything in the frame matters. When you look through the viewfinder or on the LCD, don’t just look at your subject. Take a moment and look at everything in that frame, your subject, the background, the foreground, everything. At first this may seem a little slow and awkward, but the more you do it the faster and more subconscious it will become. You will probably find that in some cases you have already done this before. In the last lesson, I asked you to find the 10 best pictures you have ever previously taken. Look at them now, go ahead, I’ll wait. Ready? Good. Now I want you to look at your best photos and see if you applied the following composition basics.

1. A clear definable subject – You should be able to take one look at the photo and instantly know why you made the picture.

2. No distracting elements – Is there anything in the frame that draws your eye away from your subject? If so, does it add to the information we have about the subject or does it distract us from the subject.

That’s it, pretty simple right? So you probably found at least of few, if not all, of your best pictures accomplished those two tasks, clear subject, no distractions. They may seem like accidents to you now, but it just proves that you are capable of applying the rules of composition, you just don’t know what all the rules are. You are about to find out what they are, but before we start with the rules I must point out that, as my favorite Caribbean pirates would say, the rules are more like guidelines. Don’t follow every one every time. That gets boring. In fact some of the greatest photos ever made were done by breaking the rules, but before you break them you have to know what they are.

Next time…The Rules of Compostion (they’re more like guidelines)

I cannot change the laws of physics

Much of what we will discuss can be applied to all types of photography digital or film since in general the same physics of light apply and composition is composition, but here in MarkWorld we will be focused on digital photography. However, any digital camera will do whether you have a compact/ point-and-shoot model or the latest digital SLR. In fact, in our next lesson we will be starting with composition, so it won’t matter if your using an $8,000 Nikon D3x or one of those disposable cardboard boxes that you bought at the checkout stand at Walmart.

Stuff you need to understand

So here we go with a few thing that will help get us all on the same sheet of paper.

1. I’m not your camera manual – There are going to be a lot (we hope) of different people reading these lessons with a lot of different types and models of cameras and although I am more than happy to help you figure out how to do some new things with your camera, all the manufactures are a little different and I am no expert at them all so please before the next lesson, take some time and Read Your Manual.

2. Cameras Take pictures, People MAKE photographs – In its simplest form a camera is just a box with a hole in it. Photography is the art of controlling what passes through that hole. If your camera is always set on full auto, then you as the photographer have almost no control over your photo. I’m going to teach you how to take control and how to get all that fancy automation to work for YOU instead of making all the decisions by itself.

3. Make Lots and Lots and Lots and Lots of Pictures – With digital, the cost of making one photo is the same as making 300 photos. You will hear me say it over and over, Make Lots of Pictures. The best way to learn is to do. My dad always tells me that everyone has something to teach you, some people teach you how to do things, some people teach you how NOT to do things, but both lessons can be equally important. In other words, take your camera with you every chance you get and practice, practice, practice. And don’t be afraid to make a bad picture, sometimes you can learn more from bad ones than good ones.

Yin or Yang? Can’t you make up your mind?

For a medium that is so closely associated with the term ‘black and white’, you are going to find that there is an awful lot of gray. The photography forums all across the internet are full of people who just want someone to tell them Exactly what aperture, ISO, shutter speed etc. that they need to set in order to get a certain look to a certain photo. They are always frustrated and disappointed with the answer which usually starts with, “well, that depends”. You see there are so many small variables that what works in one situation might not work exactly the same way in another. My goal here is not to give you a table of numbers for each situation and send you on your way, my goal is to help you understand what the variables are and how they affect your picture. Then YOU get to decide how to best use the tools that we are going to put into your photography toolbox. Remember, photography is a balance between art and physics and as a friend of mine’s grandfather once said, “Son, if everybody liked they same things they’d all be after your Grandma.”

So hopefully by now I haven’t scared you off and you are looking forward to getting to the fun part where your photos start looking better. If I have made you nervous just remember this, in the simplist of terms all I’m going to do is teach you how to see your photo before you push the shutter button. You will find that putting just a little thought into what your doing before you click will make a world of difference in how your photos look. In lesson 2 we will start on composition and you will find out how paying attention to a few details when looking through your viewfinder or on your LCD can make your pictures start to look like photographs. In the meantime your homework assignment is to pick out the 10 best pictures that you have ever taken and next time we are going to see if you might already be using some of the rules of composition without knowing it. Thanks for reading, if you have any questions just post them in the comments and I’ll answer them as soon as I can.

So what can you expect in the coming days, weeks, years on these pages? I will help you make your pictures look better, and you will help me push myself to make my pictures better. Even if you only want to take better pictures of your kids, I think I can be of some help. Speaking of kids, expect to see many pictures of my son, since he is my best model. He is not yet two and he already know to pause briefly when I point the camera at him, at which time he usually says, “I’m cute!” He is a much better model than my nieces who react to the camera by either running off screaming into the night, or by striking all the latest poses they learned watching that Hannah Alabama girl.

In addition to the photo making advice, you can also expect some of the more bizarre tales from my travels, and with my day job I have a LOT of travels. I’ve already had lunch with Jesse Jackson (ok maybe not WITH, but he did eat his big mac at the table next to me in the food court,) and shared a restroom with Gen. Wesley Clark. My dad used to refer to these celebrity-type encounters as a Brush with Greatness, but I’ll leave that decision up to you.

So there you have it, fun, travel, photography and more. I’ll do my best to take the ’scary’ out of the scary words of photography like ‘exposure’, ‘apeture’, and (gasp) COMPOSITION!!!  AAAAAHHHH!  And I’ll help you add some ‘oohs’ to those ‘aaws’ of the kids. You can even follow me on Twitter or Facebook. By the way, all the photographs you see on this site will be mine unless otherwise stated. So charge up your batteries and get ready for lesson number one, coming soon.