Our Project 52: Heart/Love and the golden spiral

My love gave me beautiful roses on Valentine’s Day….

Ok ok, STICK WITH ME until the end of this post! I promise, it’s worth it!! I don’t want this to go over your head, but when talking about composition in your photos, we are all familiar with a few of the golden rules of composition: rule of thirds, leading lines and framing. But a less known one, one that is considered a little advanced you might say, is the Golden Spiral.

Fibonacci’s Ratio

This law was made famous by Leonardo Fibonacci around 1200 A.D.  He noticed that there was an absolute ratio that appears often in nature, a design that is always there in living things that makes them pleasing to the human eye.

In the golden spiral, the curve leads the eye to the center of the spiral where your curve gets smaller and smaller.

So your subject is placed in the smaller part of the spiral and everything else falls along the spiral.

It is best used for subjects that are rounded like curves, circles or this rose….

This is not one of those things that comes naturally to most of us. Thankfully, just like all things in photography, it’s easy to practice and train your eye.

A few things I suggest:

The Camera Awesome App( by Smugmug) has compositional overlays including the golden spiral.  So download and practice on your iPhones AND your Android phones!!.

In Lightroom, to see the overlay, go to your crop tool, and hit “O” to cycle through the overlays.

In Photoshop CS6+ included the overlays as a part of their native overlays also.

If you have an older version of Photoshop, you can go to  http://goldencrop.sourceforge.net for  a free overlay.

Now if I haven’t overwhelmed you…GO FORTH AND PRACTICE!!

Now, how was your love day?! Link up your love photos below! And don’t forget to head over to Mimi to check out how heart/love photos.

Next Week’s Theme is : From Where I stand!

;