Washington Photo Safari - "It's The Composition, Stupid!" - The Essence of Good Photography

You cook a wonderful meal and your friends say: "WOW! That was GREAT! Delicious! What kind of OVEN did you use? You must have a great OVEN!"

You would be miffed, right? Because you know it's not the oven, it's the COOK who prepares a great meal. And the same is true in photography—it's not the camera, it's the photographer who makes the image.

Photography,like painting, is all about composition: the symmetry, the balance, the leading lines, the framing, the perspective, the points of interest in the image that draw the viewer's eye. So this Safari is all about training you to see and capture good composition in your photographs.

We begin the Safari in the atrium of the National Gallery of Art with a general orientation on photographic technique and principles of composition.  Next we examine 10 classically composed photographs by an extraordinary black and white photographer from Baltimore who worked in the 1940s and 1950s, A. Aubrey Bodine.  We then go inside one of the galleries to photograph and critique the compositional elements of small French paintings of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. We also look at samples of modern-day abstract art and photography.

Participants will then be sent off on their own to roam the East Building National Gallery of Art, taking pictures that embody some of the principles of composition they have learned on the Safari, photos of artwork, the Gallery's atrium, the sculpture, the museum visitors looking at artwork, or photos of the Gallery’s extraordinary architecture.

Finally, we gather once again in the atrium with the instructor to review and critique the photos taken from the point of view of good composition:  symmetry, balance, interest, leading lines. In short, this is a Safari to help you become a more astute critic of your own photos.

The Safari is led by architectural photographer and Washington Photo Safari director E. David Luria who studied photography in Paris with a protégé of the French photographer, Henri Cartier Bresson, famous for capturing "the decisive moment" in his classic photographs.