In my quest to improve my photography I registered for a Creative Design course through Metro Continuing Education in Edmonton.  This will be my fourth course through Metro and they have all been excellent so far.

The more I learn about photography the more I find there is so much more to learn.  But it really is the journey that is fun.  Learning something about this art form nearly every day is truly exciting.

The first class was a week ago.  While the course is called Creative Design, the instructor, photographer Chris Stambaugh, told us it really is a composition course and will be listed as such in the next Metro calendar.  During our first evening we went over the elements of composition then delved into the elements of Space and Line in more detail.

There was one topic that I found particularly interesting.  As I have probably mentioned before, I pretty much grew up with a camera.  From an early age I understood the technical parts of photography – f/stop, shutter speed, depth of field, etc. – but never really thought I had the creative “eye”.  My interests were more along the lines of mathematics and science rather than the creative arts.  I just figured I didn’t have the “artistic” gene.  In recent years I have come to realize that you can learn the creative parts – i.e. how to properly compose a scene (although I still think that some people are born with a more innate artistic ability).  Anyway, in last week’s class we learned that a progression of numbers first detailed by Leonardo of Pisa in 1202, known as the Fibonacci Sequence, could mathematically explain how human beings perceive beauty.  Who knew?  Well I guess Leonardo da Vinci and a host of other artists knew!  So it really just boils down to mathematics!  Maybe there is hope for a rational, scientific thinker like me yet.

Our assignment arising out of last week’s session was to produce three photographs that illustrate the composition element “Line”.  Here are the 3 photos that I submitted.  As a bit of a side-story, the snowy scene (yes that’s me in the picture) was taken the day after Albertans elected an NDP majority government after 43 years of Progressive Conservative rule.  There were lots of jokes that day about hell freezing over!  But that is another story.