Exercise - Balance.

The student is asked to select half a dozen of their existing photographs and to consider how the balance works on each one, using a sketch of a weighing scale along-side each picture to illustrate how they have  interpreted the balance.

In this picture the shadow in the top right hand corner causes the picture to be unbalanced.

This picture has reasonable symmetry in the main flower but again the background has pink flowers that unbalance the image and are distracting. However I feel that being balanced makes this a very static picture.

This image almost works but is spoiled by the round bale in the left and the tree to the top right. If these were edited out it would be a nicely balanced image with the mares neck and tail bringing about equilibrium.

Although this photograph is not balanced I think it works well to illustrate that balance is not always necessary to achieve an attractive picture.

This simple image is nicely balanced.

Again although the shoreline is slightly heavier on the right the line of cloud on the left counters it to a degree and the overall picture is not spoiled.

Reflections on Exercise - Balance.


I find that I can 'see' balance in a composition fairly clearly but actually explaining it proved difficult. Also although some photographs are greatly enhanced by being well balanced others work just as well without. I think balance or imbalance can be utilised to achieve a desired effect. The secret  (or skill) is possibly in identifying the best use of balance for a given composition.

Again the IT side of this exercise drove me demented. I have no idea how to insert the appropriate symbols for the scales sketches onto the blog and wasted far too much time trying to find out. My attempt to insert symbols resulted in the whole post going awry with lots of white background appearing in place of text. It seems that this is a fairly common phenomena on Blogger and there area variety of solutions although there don't appear to be any reasons as to why it happened in the first place. I spent hours in the HTML trying to correct it to no avail. Finally I redid the whole post and decided to leave out the 'sketches'.  I am getting pretty hacked off with this aspect.