Here is my entry.
And with the overlay.
And with the overlay.
Jim I may well be the last person you should ask about the golden ratio. As a Mathematician I understand what it is and can work with it but now I do not use it at all for 2 reasons. Firstly I think that it is bunk, many more beautiful things do not fit into it than do. Designing or photographing things that fit into spirals is no guarantee of beauty. Secondly, in the field, I often can't get my horizon level never mind placing objects on "power points". I have only 2 things that I think about when composing, do I want the main focus in the middle? If not why not? Do I want the horizon in the middle? The last is something that I often leave until later as I take a lot of panoramas with the camera absolutely level meaning to crop afterwards. Interestingly my first DSLR, an Olympus E410, had a live view grid overlay using golden sections. I could be completely wrong but as a guide to better composition it is far too complex for me. I mentioned earlier that I no longer used golden ratios but I used to. When I went back to photography, about 15 years ago. I joined a camera club and entered competitions and met with no success. I read avidly and came across golden sections and started processing my images using them, even moving objects to place them at the end of spirals. I got really good at cloning but achieved no more success as the fact that my images weren't very good had failed to register. For me landscape photography needs to be tackled holistically and not by the application of a set of rules. KenBen, sorry to being the poo poo'er on everyone's entries, but so far I haven't seen any that fit the Golden Ratio. I don't think this does either.
The spiral is just going through empty water, the purpose of the spiral is to show where the viewers eyes will travel when looking at the image. When I see your excellent bird image here, I see the bird, I do start at the head like you have as a starting point. But instead of my eyes traveling along the spiral path, my eyes go along the body of the bird towards it's tail.
Maybe @Ken Rennie can help with some insight to the Golden Ratio? I don't know if he has any experience with it. Or if someone else has been using the Golden Ratio, it would be great to get some more feedback and insight. Maybe @Bob also might be familiar with it?
Thanks for the backstory Ken. I would agree with your assessment of it.Jim I may well be the last person you should ask about the golden ratio. As a Mathematician I understand what it is and can work with it but now I do not use it at all for 2 reasons. Firstly I think that it is bunk, many more beautiful things do not fit into it than do. Designing or photographing things that fit into spirals is no guarantee of beauty. Secondly, in the field, I often can't get my horizon level never mind placing objects on "power points". I have only 2 things that I think about when composing, do I want the main focus in the middle? If not why not? Do I want the horizon in the middle? The last is something that I often leave until later as I take a lot of panoramas with the camera absolutely level meaning to crop afterwards. Interestingly my first DSLR, an Olympus E410, had a live view grid overlay using golden sections. I could be completely wrong but as a guide to better composition it is far too complex for me. I mentioned earlier that I no longer used golden ratios but I used to. When I went back to photography, about 15 years ago. I joined a camera club and entered competitions and met with no success. I read avidly and came across golden sections and started processing my images using them, even moving objects to place them at the end of spirals. I got really good at cloning but achieved no more success as the fact that my images weren't very good had failed to register. For me landscape photography needs to be tackled holistically and not by the application of a set of rules. Ken
Ben, your end point is correct, the issue is nothing is along the spiral to pull the eye to end point.Jim, as you see, I used the end point of the spiral to place the eye, just as I would with the rule of thirds and in fact not much different than had I used the ROT. If the entire spiral is supposed to have elements, then I am hard pressed to say I have ever seen anything in nature that would conform. I think this rule has more application in architecture or maybe formal art where the artist can construct elements at will.
I have sort of the same idea about ROT. When I see something of interest, it's in the dead center of my vision, not off to one side. And most time the horizon is dead center. So I put them off center just because I got tired of hearing "it's too centered? not because I saw any improvement.
I think it's great to have a discussion like this Jameel. It makes us all think more about compositions, and that's a huge positive.As I wrote on the other thread the spiral is a geometric represent of the Fibonacci series which converges to the golden ratio. None of classic examples of the golden ratio I have seen has anything to do with the spiral and all to do with the placement of the subject.
in any case it’s good to see a healthy discussion on this subject. And that’s a positive in my book.