Iterative Composition

[admin]

It used to be, in the film era, you couldn't see the pictures you had taken until you got your slides developed. Whether you took your film to a one-hour photo place or mailed it in to Kodak or another mail-order processor, you didn't get to see your pictures while you were still on location where you took them. Thankfully, digital has changed all that. And since you can now see your photos as soon as you take them, you can learn from your mistakes in time to try again. This lets you not only adjust your exposure as needed, it lets you fine tune your composition using a technique I like to call "iterative composition."....

More... (http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/iterative-composition.html)

[dicklaxt]

So is this what the manual refers to as "recompose"?

dick

[jerryph]

No Dick, let me see if I can explain a little better...

Let's use the example of a bride in a white dress with a black wall behind her. If you let the camera choose the exposure, it will want to focus on an average of the complete scene, make the black wall grey and blow out the bride in her white dress.

Recompose is where you place the attention of the camera's meter on the object that you want to have properly exposed, either by zooming in on it or placing the metering mode into spot metering and place the exact spot that you want metered properly (the bride's face, for example), and press the shutter 1/2 way down to lock in exposure and focus settings, but now that picture would look VERY poorly composed... so without removing your finger from the shutter that is still 1/2 way down, you change the zoom and perhaps also the angle of what you see in the eyepiece for a more pleasant composition. THIS last part is called recomposing.

Obviously, all that is left to do, once you have recomposed your pic is to press the shutter. :)

Iterative composition is where you look at the LCD and see a completed shot and make camera adjustments based on your last picture. I feel that most photographers that are shooting a scene and "chimping" in between pictures are doing iterative composition. The word iterative simply means "repeating; making repetition; repetitious", so make many pictures of the same scene and make changes in between each picture in this case is what is meant by Iterative Composition.

[dicklaxt]

Thank you ,thank you, thank you,now that really makes sense to me believe it or not with all my questions and the answers I usually get and how they breed more qustions within the same subject,maybe I'm starting to grasp a little of his afterall,,,,,,,,,,I make you a Professor
Emeritus.

dick