Composition help....

Although I'm by no means an expert at composition I do know someone who is, have been on photo shoots with them and they've run cropping exercises at our local camera club. BTW I find you can learn a lot from cropping challenges and I must admit, although the books might say get it right in camera, I'm a great believer in including more than you need and post cropping to adjust the composition.

I certainly like your idea of introducing some context into your image of boots by including a doormat, an umbrella and a door. I think there's a bit too much door although the boot mat location in the bottom right diagonal looks good so I'd crop off the top - just below the umbrellas where it is now and if you had an old fashioned non folding brollie I'd have it leaning up in the corner.

Just my 10c but it's an interesting topic and I'm sure you'll get lots of other opinions as there are no real rules (in fact one of the themes for our camera club this month is "breaking the rules" as we've had quite a few composition rule based discussions in the past year!)

Tony


PS and the way it's lit makes me think that an off-centre vignette could be used to take the eye to the boots.

Thanks, Tony. I tried your suggestion and hope I followed it correctly. I don't have one of those umbrellas but if I find one to borrow I'll give it a try. Sounds like a good suggestion.
Much better than my idea to bring them to a dock as that sounds like a bit of a pain.

That's a great suggestion Tony, especially with the better sensors which allow hard cropping. Leaving space around the primary subjects is a great idea AND mandatory if an image will be printed at different sizes. Unfortunately, in North America the standard print sizes use different length:width ratios. Point being, prints of diff sizes from one image need to be cropped differently so extra space on all sides is good. (8 by 10 is the worst..it varies so far form the standard camera image L:W ratios.) The Euro method (A3, A4) makes more sense as (unless I am mistaken) the L:W ratio is 1.41 for all sizes. I digress. 

Helen, remember we discussed birds flying left to right because our occidental eyes read that way? I think this image is somewhat too one-sided in any case, BUT if you were to keep the one-sided asymmetry, then it would flow better if it was flipped horizontally and looked like an "L." Of course, you don't want to reverse your images, but perhaps placement could be changed...I don't know the lay of your condo.  

Now, to my eye, I'd like to see more balance left to right and I do not mean symmetrical. Hope you are okay with this crude mock up...below. 

Not saying it's perfect..just demonstrating a concept. My brain "sees" a stronger, more-balanced base to hold the umbrella, which perhaps looks better if displayed at full length (although your collapsible umbrella might not do this.) 

Musings on a chilly evening! 
 
Clive
   

Apart from the rule of thirds and rule of odds I am pretty much clueless when it comes to composition. But I do have to say I like Clive's idea for this one as I find the placement of the items to be well balanced to my eye.

So I tried Lillias' suggestion with the jacket today......
Did try to take more than I needed so that I could play some with the crop.....also attempted to balance the image as Clive suggested....



Tried again.....thought maybe if I moved the boots away from the chair a bit it might help the balance. Tried folding them over, laying one down, etc. but nothing looked right.
Also think the white chair rail and molding along the floor don't work. Couldn't find any processing that I liked, so in the end tried doctoring up the image with Sepiana's B/W sketch action on a separate layer at reduced opacity.



I do think I do better with composition when out and about but trying to do a still life composition kills me.

May need to see if I can find another pair for a still life. Because I guess trial and error is how we learn.

Thanks, Lillias...I do like this composition better....especially the jacket. Also I think the sketch effect helps the overall presentation.

I prefer the second one too but, just to be different and put more emphasis on the boots which I think was the original intent I'd crop off the top so it looks more like this:



Tony