The Art of Photography: Exploring Negative Space and Simplification

Everything simplification only the elements are here that are needed the splattering is there because in these environmental portraits Arnold Newman signifies that that is in fact what the person does is he's a Becks artist so it is required so anyway moving along I'm gonna give you an example this is another one of my favorite images this is Joseph Hoffler and wonderful photographer Austrian and this is an image just basically of a small waterfall but look at how the negative space and several areas just define the subject in the middle and it's really almost an abstract you can barely make out because you've probably seen small waterfalls before that this is indeed running water but you have pure black space up here that's negative pure black space down hence negative some negative space in the middle actually that's white and the way they come together to form this image this is something that is more difficult to do compositionally it's something he really thought through and I think it works to a great extent here.

Another example of this ironically less abstract is man raised famous negative kiss and when you first glance at this image sometimes it looks like maybe a plant with leaves or something botanical and then you realize that it's two faces that are kissing and it's actually displayed in negative rather than positive and again you were playing with figure-ground relationships they come together in the middle to form what essentially kind of starts looking like a botanical form or some plant life type thing or organically it's also faces and lips so very interesting this would not have the same effect have this been turned into the positive and I think this was exceptionally interesting use albeit oddest of what's going on with negative space so anyway excellent excellent stuff just a couple others that'll show you real quick again Keith Carter I think one of the greatest living people today in photography this is a heron that was shot with some kind of abstract in the background is it you know a moon is it a street light what is it but anyway it's defined by largely negative space and simplification what's interesting is perhaps that blur is arbitrary and if that were taken out it would have a different feel it adds a little bit of symmetry to the eye of the Heron and it's up here in the corner which does draw attention to it and I think it adds just a little bit of needed balance to this picture I think it's in the right place it would be a little bit different I don't think would be unbalanced but I think it gives a depth and it's balanced in that sense which is very interesting you can go through here these are all my stuff on Pinterest just another couple real quick.

This is Arnold Newman again it's a portrait of Aaron Copland famous composer american composer who has a wonderful profile and such a great nose but you can see that you have negative space up here around the sheet music defining that and the sheet music acts is negative space to define the head and that profile more strikingly again working together this is kind of a double to bring emphasis to the subject at hand. One last thing I want to show you we've talked about this image before let me show you the other version of this first the famous Stravinsky image and we talked about this this so far is kind of worked in every episode it contains elements of line it contains elements of shape and it's also defined by negative space what is the negative space here well the background could be considered negative space but really the piano lid sorry is actually defining a lot of negative space itself what's really interesting is here is the original image of this and I found this online on somebody's blog and this is the full 4 by 5 that Stravinsky photographed he decided later for the print to crop this to play more on the negative space and to make it even more striking it works very well as an image without the crop but it really adds that sense of minimalism and emphasis on the shapes lines rule thirds all the directions that are going on in this the diagonals the negative space use and you know what the final result was is you know it's cropped but it's it's extremely interesting and again this is is a wonderful photograph and I think it's really interesting that he chose this cropping on that so anyway once again you can check all this stuff out on Pinterest Pinterest comm / Ted forbs you can kind of check out what we're doing in advance because I will build these usually before I record the episode so they're ready when I'm ready to show them and if you got any questions email me hit me up on Twitter Facebook or whatever and you know we'll catch you next time happy composing and go ahead and start shooting and start thinking about negative space start thinking about simplification and maybe even start thinking about minimalism a little bit and we'll continue next time all right guys it's been the art of photography and thank you for watching

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneverybody my name is Ted Forbes and welcome back again to another episode of the art of photography and today we're continuing on on our composition series here and we're going to discuss two concepts one is simplification and the other one is negative space and there's a reason them to do these together because I think they intertwine quite well and as usual what we're going to do is if you're interested in reading more we have a blog that we're keeping so if you go to composition study com or you can go to the artifact Rafi TV on the main website and find a link from there but what we're doing is we're just keeping kind of a journal and kind of a log and writing these things out you can see all the sample images there and it's a wonderful chance to kind of follow along where we are with the composition you can also follow along and Pinterest because I'm bookmarking a lot of images there and my URL and there's just Pinterest comm slash Ted Forbes and so anyway the subject that we're talking about today a simplification and negative space simplification is I think it's a very easy concept but it's one of the hardest things in photography or painting or anything else particularly photography and I think it's one of the things that people will have to try the hardest to get good at I know I do and basically simplification is just reducing your image or the components of your composition down to what is absolutely necessary so it means taking things out of the picture that are extraneous that don't have anything to do with the subject or the picture or what it is you're trying to say visually or any of that so a lot of times you know it's really easy to think of this is the same thing as being a minimalist or minimalist photography and I think it is to some point that's a real easy no pun intended simplification of this but I think even more so it's doesn't necessarily have to apply to just minimalism it's just simply removing extraneous details that do not do anything to enhance your picture yet to give it more clarity years ago when I was in design school and I was getting formal training in that area I had a teacher who was really good and she used to talk about this is what she called figure slash ground relationships you have figure ground relationships and just on the very simple visual composition element you have figures which is your subject or elements that are in the composition and you have the ground and the ground think of it is just a blank canvas it you know if it's a painting it's the actual size of the painting if it's a page in a magazine it's the page of the magazine if it's a photo it's however big your images and whatever those dimensions are that is the ground and the figure is what goes on top of that and so we used to talk a lot about I'm gonna start talking about them here or figure-ground relationships and this is a very simple thing but it's really hard to get down and master particularly I think with photography because photography if you're in a studio environment everything's very controlled and that's one thing if you're doing street photography or you're doing landscapes it's harder to control what's going on in your image usually it's easy to be lazy and just go photograph stuff and if there's you know a light post or something that doesn't fit with the image whatever it was there this requires doing a lot of things it requires changing your viewpoint changing your idea of what the composition should be it requires getting in closer moving in further back it requires looking at your image and understanding what it is that you're photographing understand how these compositional elements are playing together and going that extra mile in simplification terms to reduce that and it's easier said than done we are going to look at some images in a second we're going to point out some really good examples of this process but it's hard to do and I think it's hard for photographers to do because we're not drawing things into our composition we don't have to put them in they're already there and so removing them is even more difficult for somebody who draws or paints this is different because you simply decide not to draw it or you know decide not to paint whatever and so there's ways of masking that out which are more difficult I think for photographers so that's the idea of simplification it's just simply reducing it down in your figure-ground relationship to only the figures that need to be there and how they relate to that ground now we're going to use that to segue into what I want to talk about with negative space negative space is simply it's a weird term because it doesn't mean negative in the sense that it's bad space or it's that's poor for your composition it simply means it's empty space that allows the figures in your composition to breathe a little bit sometimes you have lots of negative space sometimes you don't have much at all and it's really tricky and very difficult to understand how that negative space red relates to what's going on with the subject in the composition so let me put it this way like for instance if I do a really minimalist composition composition of a boat on a horizon the horizon the sky the the water that could be negative space there's not a lot of activity going on there there may be a little bit of texture a little bit of pattern maybe it's a solid color if the skies at night or up through the day Midway and that's okay it's allowing the subject which is would be this boat on the horizon to breathe a bit and it allows it to speak more loudly it puts more emphasis on the figure that's sitting on the ground there's a lot of ways of doing this another kind of trick that I like to talk about a lot is if you actually have your figure ground relationships the closer to the edges you put figures and allow it to breathe with negative space the more emphasis you're going to have on them so if you take a portrait of somebody and we'll look at some of these in a minute and their head is off-center and maybe it's towards one of the corners or one of the sides it starts to create a little bit of energy a little bit of dynamicism dynamicism so that bring emphasis to that subject it doesn't work when you have a lot of extraneous stuff and the rest of the image because that's all grabbing the viewers attention as well so you have to have that contrast of the negative space there to allow that subject to breathe and so you know I think the easiest thing to do is think of these in terms of minimalist photography but I mean we're going to look at some examples in just a second that are both will look at some minimalist examples and some examples that are just really genuinely good uses of negative space and then I got a couple examples where people are really tricking it out to do interesting things so anyway come on over to the computer and we'll have a look and we'll talk about simplification and negative space some of these images you have seen before I've showed them to you Michael Kenna is a photographer we've covered oh gosh it's been a couple years one of my favorites and a minute ago I know I said that simplification and minimalism aren't necessarily the same thing however simplification is an essential ingredient to minimalism and I think these images show it best which is why I'm going to start here this is a beautiful image it's just very typical of Canon it's a square square ratioed image of a fence and a snowstorm and is beautiful you're also going to start seeing as we go through these that some of the concepts that we've talked about in previous episodes on here going to start to overlap and so obviously you're seeing use of line an implied line that's made up of a bunch of little lines of fence posts and so if you've already discovered that you're going to see that a lot of the stuff starts tying itself together and that's what interesting work it's an interesting way of communicating concepts that you know we as we're discussing in these episodes deemed to be more interesting in terms of composition and trying to get your own voice and do new things with that Canada's this very well but anyway this use of negative space you can barely see the horizon back here but the point of this image is is the negative space around it defines this fence it defines a certain proportion it defines a certain location of where that is in the image and if this were pulled back or cropped differently would have a different feel but in essence that's what we have is excellent use of line excellent use of negative space it's not negative you know it's snow but it is it's space that allows that fence to breathe and that's what defines it and you're going to see this a lot in Michael kena's work here's some other images another one of my favorites is just a little clump of trees again in the snow with a cloudy sky not a lot of definition very high contrast image most of your definition occurs with this little clump of trees but again they're beautiful in a way that is defined by that negative space around them in the subtle shadows that come under them and this is why daggit of space simplification is so important there's nothing in this image that is not important there you could argue that there's some texture in the sky that could come or go but I would say I would argue that it stays because it does create a little bit of of depth to that negative space but not so much that it's distracting so anyway very interesting again Michael can a famous image some some boards sticking out of water and look at where they're placed they're not dead center they are vertically but not excuse me they are dead centered vertically but not horizontally they're they're off to the right and that is defined by that negative space around it it's not just our bolete row thrown onto the ground or onto the canvas as we say but it's it's a very specific placement a very specific symmetry that comes from the reflection and the water and the use of negative space is what really defines that so this is what's important here so those are some really minimalist images and you know maybe one that's not as minimalist is this is a famous on riccati a result image taken in France of a of an orchard of trees that the road runs through and it's again very beautifully placed we haven't really gotten back into rule of thirds yet but it does comply with that but really what's important is the use of negative space if there were clouds in the sky it would have a different feel and it really again simplification what's important here is the the road and the trees the field supports it to an extent the sky definitely backs it up because it is well used negative space so that's another great great example another one that's really cool I've covered Arnold Newman on here before famous for doing environmental portraits as he called them this is a portrait of artist William de Kooning taken in New York and 59 and de Kooning's work he was you know one of the key figures in the New York Abstract Expressionism movement and I love the way he's incorporated de Kooning's portrait in with how something that signifies the way to Kooning worked with some of the splatter and some of the Abstract Expressionism that comes into this and again this would feel very different if it were not taken through a sheet if de Kooning space weren't where it is remember I said earlier that you know figures on your ground if they're near the edge of the of the the canvas or on the ground it gives them more emphasis and this one shows that it's that you can see his face is very near the edge of the ground it would not work if there were more activity if he'd not used a piece of plastic or whatever it is that the paint splattered on and you'd have more definition in the window and it would start to take away from this image so again perfect placement with everything simplification only the elements are here that are needed the splattering is there because in these environmental portraits Arnold Newman signifies that that is in fact what the person does is he's a Becks artist so it is required so anyway moving along I'm gonna give you an example this is another one of my favorite images this is Joseph Hoffler and wonderful photographer Austrian and this is an image just basically of a small waterfall but look at how the negative space and several areas just define the subject in the middle and it's really almost an abstract you can barely make out because you've probably seen small waterfalls before that this is indeed running water but you have pure black space up here that's negative pure black space down hence negative some negative space in the middle actually that's white and the way they come together to form this image this is something that is more difficult to do compositionally it's something he really thought through and I think it works to a great extent here another example of this ironically less abstract is man raised famous negative kiss and when you first glance at this image sometimes it looks like maybe a plant with leaves or something botanical and then you realize that it's two faces that are kissing and it's actually displayed in negative rather than positive and again you were playing with figure-ground relationships they come together in the middle to form what essentially kind of starts looking like a botanical form or some plant life type thing or organically it's also faces and lips so very interesting this would not have the same effect have this been turned into the positive and I think this was exceptionally interesting use albeit oddest of what's going on with negative space so anyway excellent excellent stuff just a couple others that'll show you real quick again Keith Carter I think one of the greatest living people today in photography this is a heron that was shot with some kind of abstract in the background is it you know a moon is it a street light what is it but anyway it's defined by largely negative space and simplification what's interesting is perhaps that blur is arbitrary and if that were taken out it would have a different feel it adds a little bit of symmetry to the eye of the Heron and it's up here in the corner which does draw attention to it and I think it adds just a little bit of needed balance to this picture I think it's in the right place it would be a little bit different I don't think would be unbalanced but I think it gives a depth and it's balanced in that sense which is very interesting you can go through here these are all my stuff on Pinterest just another couple real quick this is Arnold Newman again it's a portrait of Aaron Copland famous composer american composer who has a wonderful profile and such a great nose but you can see that you have negative space up here around the sheet music defining that and the sheet music acts is negative space to define the head and that profile more strikingly again working together this is kind of a double to bring emphasis to the subject at hand and one last thing I want to show you we've talked about this image before let me show you the other version of this first the famous Stravinsky image and we talked about this this so far is kind of worked in every episode it contains elements of line it contains elements of shape and it's also defined by negative space what is the negative space here well the background could be considered negative space but really the piano lid sorry is actually defining a lot of negative space itself what's really interesting is here is the original image of this and I found this online on somebody's blog and this is the full 4 by 5 that Stravinsky photographed he decided later for the print to crop this to play more on the negative space and to make it even more striking it works very well as an image without the crop but it really adds that sense of minimalism and emphasis on the shapes lines rule thirds all the directions that are going on in this the diagonals the negative space use and you know what the final result was is you know it's cropped but it's it's extremely interesting and again this is is a wonderful photograph and I think it's really interesting that he chose this cropping on that so anyway once again you can check all this stuff out on Pinterest Pinterest comm / Ted forbs you can kind of check out what we're doing in advance because I will build these usually before I record the episode so they're ready when I'm ready to show them and if you got any questions email me hit me up on Twitter Facebook or whatever and you know we'll catch you next time happy composing and go ahead and start shooting and start thinking about negative space start thinking about simplification and maybe even start thinking about minimalism a little bit and we'll continue next time all right guys it's been the art of photography and thank you for watchingeverybody my name is Ted Forbes and welcome back again to another episode of the art of photography and today we're continuing on on our composition series here and we're going to discuss two concepts one is simplification and the other one is negative space and there's a reason them to do these together because I think they intertwine quite well and as usual what we're going to do is if you're interested in reading more we have a blog that we're keeping so if you go to composition study com or you can go to the artifact Rafi TV on the main website and find a link from there but what we're doing is we're just keeping kind of a journal and kind of a log and writing these things out you can see all the sample images there and it's a wonderful chance to kind of follow along where we are with the composition you can also follow along and Pinterest because I'm bookmarking a lot of images there and my URL and there's just Pinterest comm slash Ted Forbes and so anyway the subject that we're talking about today a simplification and negative space simplification is I think it's a very easy concept but it's one of the hardest things in photography or painting or anything else particularly photography and I think it's one of the things that people will have to try the hardest to get good at I know I do and basically simplification is just reducing your image or the components of your composition down to what is absolutely necessary so it means taking things out of the picture that are extraneous that don't have anything to do with the subject or the picture or what it is you're trying to say visually or any of that so a lot of times you know it's really easy to think of this is the same thing as being a minimalist or minimalist photography and I think it is to some point that's a real easy no pun intended simplification of this but I think even more so it's doesn't necessarily have to apply to just minimalism it's just simply removing extraneous details that do not do anything to enhance your picture yet to give it more clarity years ago when I was in design school and I was getting formal training in that area I had a teacher who was really good and she used to talk about this is what she called figure slash ground relationships you have figure ground relationships and just on the very simple visual composition element you have figures which is your subject or elements that are in the composition and you have the ground and the ground think of it is just a blank canvas it you know if it's a painting it's the actual size of the painting if it's a page in a magazine it's the page of the magazine if it's a photo it's however big your images and whatever those dimensions are that is the ground and the figure is what goes on top of that and so we used to talk a lot about I'm gonna start talking about them here or figure-ground relationships and this is a very simple thing but it's really hard to get down and master particularly I think with photography because photography if you're in a studio environment everything's very controlled and that's one thing if you're doing street photography or you're doing landscapes it's harder to control what's going on in your image usually it's easy to be lazy and just go photograph stuff and if there's you know a light post or something that doesn't fit with the image whatever it was there this requires doing a lot of things it requires changing your viewpoint changing your idea of what the composition should be it requires getting in closer moving in further back it requires looking at your image and understanding what it is that you're photographing understand how these compositional elements are playing together and going that extra mile in simplification terms to reduce that and it's easier said than done we are going to look at some images in a second we're going to point out some really good examples of this process but it's hard to do and I think it's hard for photographers to do because we're not drawing things into our composition we don't have to put them in they're already there and so removing them is even more difficult for somebody who draws or paints this is different because you simply decide not to draw it or you know decide not to paint whatever and so there's ways of masking that out which are more difficult I think for photographers so that's the idea of simplification it's just simply reducing it down in your figure-ground relationship to only the figures that need to be there and how they relate to that ground now we're going to use that to segue into what I want to talk about with negative space negative space is simply it's a weird term because it doesn't mean negative in the sense that it's bad space or it's that's poor for your composition it simply means it's empty space that allows the figures in your composition to breathe a little bit sometimes you have lots of negative space sometimes you don't have much at all and it's really tricky and very difficult to understand how that negative space red relates to what's going on with the subject in the composition so let me put it this way like for instance if I do a really minimalist composition composition of a boat on a horizon the horizon the sky the the water that could be negative space there's not a lot of activity going on there there may be a little bit of texture a little bit of pattern maybe it's a solid color if the skies at night or up through the day Midway and that's okay it's allowing the subject which is would be this boat on the horizon to breathe a bit and it allows it to speak more loudly it puts more emphasis on the figure that's sitting on the ground there's a lot of ways of doing this another kind of trick that I like to talk about a lot is if you actually have your figure ground relationships the closer to the edges you put figures and allow it to breathe with negative space the more emphasis you're going to have on them so if you take a portrait of somebody and we'll look at some of these in a minute and their head is off-center and maybe it's towards one of the corners or one of the sides it starts to create a little bit of energy a little bit of dynamicism dynamicism so that bring emphasis to that subject it doesn't work when you have a lot of extraneous stuff and the rest of the image because that's all grabbing the viewers attention as well so you have to have that contrast of the negative space there to allow that subject to breathe and so you know I think the easiest thing to do is think of these in terms of minimalist photography but I mean we're going to look at some examples in just a second that are both will look at some minimalist examples and some examples that are just really genuinely good uses of negative space and then I got a couple examples where people are really tricking it out to do interesting things so anyway come on over to the computer and we'll have a look and we'll talk about simplification and negative space some of these images you have seen before I've showed them to you Michael Kenna is a photographer we've covered oh gosh it's been a couple years one of my favorites and a minute ago I know I said that simplification and minimalism aren't necessarily the same thing however simplification is an essential ingredient to minimalism and I think these images show it best which is why I'm going to start here this is a beautiful image it's just very typical of Canon it's a square square ratioed image of a fence and a snowstorm and is beautiful you're also going to start seeing as we go through these that some of the concepts that we've talked about in previous episodes on here going to start to overlap and so obviously you're seeing use of line an implied line that's made up of a bunch of little lines of fence posts and so if you've already discovered that you're going to see that a lot of the stuff starts tying itself together and that's what interesting work it's an interesting way of communicating concepts that you know we as we're discussing in these episodes deemed to be more interesting in terms of composition and trying to get your own voice and do new things with that Canada's this very well but anyway this use of negative space you can barely see the horizon back here but the point of this image is is the negative space around it defines this fence it defines a certain proportion it defines a certain location of where that is in the image and if this were pulled back or cropped differently would have a different feel but in essence that's what we have is excellent use of line excellent use of negative space it's not negative you know it's snow but it is it's space that allows that fence to breathe and that's what defines it and you're going to see this a lot in Michael kena's work here's some other images another one of my favorites is just a little clump of trees again in the snow with a cloudy sky not a lot of definition very high contrast image most of your definition occurs with this little clump of trees but again they're beautiful in a way that is defined by that negative space around them in the subtle shadows that come under them and this is why daggit of space simplification is so important there's nothing in this image that is not important there you could argue that there's some texture in the sky that could come or go but I would say I would argue that it stays because it does create a little bit of of depth to that negative space but not so much that it's distracting so anyway very interesting again Michael can a famous image some some boards sticking out of water and look at where they're placed they're not dead center they are vertically but not excuse me they are dead centered vertically but not horizontally they're they're off to the right and that is defined by that negative space around it it's not just our bolete row thrown onto the ground or onto the canvas as we say but it's it's a very specific placement a very specific symmetry that comes from the reflection and the water and the use of negative space is what really defines that so this is what's important here so those are some really minimalist images and you know maybe one that's not as minimalist is this is a famous on riccati a result image taken in France of a of an orchard of trees that the road runs through and it's again very beautifully placed we haven't really gotten back into rule of thirds yet but it does comply with that but really what's important is the use of negative space if there were clouds in the sky it would have a different feel and it really again simplification what's important here is the the road and the trees the field supports it to an extent the sky definitely backs it up because it is well used negative space so that's another great great example another one that's really cool I've covered Arnold Newman on here before famous for doing environmental portraits as he called them this is a portrait of artist William de Kooning taken in New York and 59 and de Kooning's work he was you know one of the key figures in the New York Abstract Expressionism movement and I love the way he's incorporated de Kooning's portrait in with how something that signifies the way to Kooning worked with some of the splatter and some of the Abstract Expressionism that comes into this and again this would feel very different if it were not taken through a sheet if de Kooning space weren't where it is remember I said earlier that you know figures on your ground if they're near the edge of the of the the canvas or on the ground it gives them more emphasis and this one shows that it's that you can see his face is very near the edge of the ground it would not work if there were more activity if he'd not used a piece of plastic or whatever it is that the paint splattered on and you'd have more definition in the window and it would start to take away from this image so again perfect placement with everything simplification only the elements are here that are needed the splattering is there because in these environmental portraits Arnold Newman signifies that that is in fact what the person does is he's a Becks artist so it is required so anyway moving along I'm gonna give you an example this is another one of my favorite images this is Joseph Hoffler and wonderful photographer Austrian and this is an image just basically of a small waterfall but look at how the negative space and several areas just define the subject in the middle and it's really almost an abstract you can barely make out because you've probably seen small waterfalls before that this is indeed running water but you have pure black space up here that's negative pure black space down hence negative some negative space in the middle actually that's white and the way they come together to form this image this is something that is more difficult to do compositionally it's something he really thought through and I think it works to a great extent here another example of this ironically less abstract is man raised famous negative kiss and when you first glance at this image sometimes it looks like maybe a plant with leaves or something botanical and then you realize that it's two faces that are kissing and it's actually displayed in negative rather than positive and again you were playing with figure-ground relationships they come together in the middle to form what essentially kind of starts looking like a botanical form or some plant life type thing or organically it's also faces and lips so very interesting this would not have the same effect have this been turned into the positive and I think this was exceptionally interesting use albeit oddest of what's going on with negative space so anyway excellent excellent stuff just a couple others that'll show you real quick again Keith Carter I think one of the greatest living people today in photography this is a heron that was shot with some kind of abstract in the background is it you know a moon is it a street light what is it but anyway it's defined by largely negative space and simplification what's interesting is perhaps that blur is arbitrary and if that were taken out it would have a different feel it adds a little bit of symmetry to the eye of the Heron and it's up here in the corner which does draw attention to it and I think it adds just a little bit of needed balance to this picture I think it's in the right place it would be a little bit different I don't think would be unbalanced but I think it gives a depth and it's balanced in that sense which is very interesting you can go through here these are all my stuff on Pinterest just another couple real quick this is Arnold Newman again it's a portrait of Aaron Copland famous composer american composer who has a wonderful profile and such a great nose but you can see that you have negative space up here around the sheet music defining that and the sheet music acts is negative space to define the head and that profile more strikingly again working together this is kind of a double to bring emphasis to the subject at hand and one last thing I want to show you we've talked about this image before let me show you the other version of this first the famous Stravinsky image and we talked about this this so far is kind of worked in every episode it contains elements of line it contains elements of shape and it's also defined by negative space what is the negative space here well the background could be considered negative space but really the piano lid sorry is actually defining a lot of negative space itself what's really interesting is here is the original image of this and I found this online on somebody's blog and this is the full 4 by 5 that Stravinsky photographed he decided later for the print to crop this to play more on the negative space and to make it even more striking it works very well as an image without the crop but it really adds that sense of minimalism and emphasis on the shapes lines rule thirds all the directions that are going on in this the diagonals the negative space use and you know what the final result was is you know it's cropped but it's it's extremely interesting and again this is is a wonderful photograph and I think it's really interesting that he chose this cropping on that so anyway once again you can check all this stuff out on Pinterest Pinterest comm / Ted forbs you can kind of check out what we're doing in advance because I will build these usually before I record the episode so they're ready when I'm ready to show them and if you got any questions email me hit me up on Twitter Facebook or whatever and you know we'll catch you next time happy composing and go ahead and start shooting and start thinking about negative space start thinking about simplification and maybe even start thinking about minimalism a little bit and we'll continue next time all right guys it's been the art of photography and thank you for watching\n"