Where Does Ron Get His Funny Ideas About Composition?

From looking at picture books and movies much of my life and have found good photographers follow many of the same simple "rules" which are my first 3 rules of composition. The fourth is "Do you like it?"

I have also shot millions of feet of 35-mm movie film for TV commercials. I usually operated camera myself, but when I let others operate for various reasons, the most common mistake they made was including pieces of equipment or things in the shot that they "didn't see".

It takes training to see everything in the frame and not just the action of the actors within the scene. It takes complete control of the frame composition to have enough attention left to worry about exposure, focus, and what the actors are doing. It's like driving on the freeway and keeping the right distances of your car to other cars and not even thinking about it.

As I progressed as a cameraperson, my shots got simpler and simpler relying on good composition, frame content and appropriate lighting to tell the story.

I am trying to teach the bare necessities to save camera people years of trial and error to learn what took me more than 20 years to learn.

If you rely on a MTV, handheld, continuously moving camera style, plan to do only MTV work. If you plan for the big screen or TV better learn a level camera, clean fame lines and carefully selected frame content.

© Copyright 1999-2004 Ron Dexter. All Rights Reserved.