As I blogged yesterday, I spent an hour or so on Sunday morning in Leinster House touring the houses of the Oireachtas and taking in some of the sights of the building as part of the open-house weekend that is becoming an annual event. As the tour of the building finished, we ended up in the foyer, which is crowned by the magnificent ceiling that you see here, and illuminated by the equally magnificent and ornate gold chandelier.
I mentioned last week that I’m turning my attention more and more to composition in my photography, and with that in mind I’m currently reading an excellent book on the subject called “The Photographer’s Eye”. Early on in that book the author Michael Freeman highlights images which have the subject centred in the photograph, and how this can generally be quite a static composition. To introduce a more dynamic feel into an image, offsetting the subject, especially where this is just a single small subject, is a good approach. The terms “static” and “dynamic” in this context are a bit vague and there’s a danger of talking in “art speak” in relation to composition, but in general the argument put forward by Freeman is that static is boring, dynamic is exciting, or simply static is bad, dynamic is good. Accepting this argument at face value, we can conclude that putting the subject of a photograph off-centre in the frame is, more often than not, a good thing.
Where it is not necessarily a bad thing to centre a subject, however, is where that subject has a symmetry that should itself be an important element of the photograph. When I looked up at the ceiling of the foyer in Leinster House, it was the symmetry of the scene that struck me first, and the colour of it second.
I therefore took some time to compose this image carefully. I wanted to put the chandelier in the centre of the frame – this was easily achieved by looking through the viewfinder and positioning myself until I could no longer see the chain from which it was hanging, and until the base of the chandelier was centred in the ceiling rose above.
I also needed to pay attention to the edges of the frame, and tried to achieve symmetry in how the ceiling itself was framed in the photograph. This task was a little more difficult due to the distortion which the necessary use of the wide angle lens was introducing. Indeed for a true symmetric background, I should crop the image slightly along the right hand side.
I helped ease the effects of distortion in post-processing with the free-transform tool in Photoshop which allowed me to warp the edges a little and take some of the curve of the distortion out of the final image.
This is one of those photographs that I really really liked when I saw it on the back of the camera, and even more so when I viewed it later on the laptop screen. I think it would make an interesting canvas, with the 32 arms of the chandelier adding an interesting dimension to the picture and, in my view at least, making it more than just a photograph of a nice ceiling.
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