A quick composition tip today. It's quite an easy technique and can produce a lot of "wall worthy" photos from your travels (or your hometown for that matter).

Pattern Recognition

Simply put, we want to keep an eye out for shapes and colours that repeat, and completely fill the frame with the pattern.



You can find these patterns absolutely anywhere; rocks on a beach, tiles on a bathroom floor,  the knobby tread of a motorcycle tire. Isolate the pattern with the frame of camera, abstract it to it's simplest elements.



I find this technique works best when you completely eliminate any distracting elements from the frame. Move the camera around until you see only the objects that make up the pattern.

These railroad fasteners were found in the back of a railway gondola car in Ontario. I climbed up the edge, hung the camera into the car at arms-length, and snapped away in hopes that one of the shots would work. This one did.




Close-up or far away, these patterns happen anywhere.






Look around where you are sitting right now, make a square with your thumbs and index fingers, look through it with one eye closed. I'll bet there's ten things in the room that could make great pattern based photos!