Digital Photography Composition of the Week

Mercedes Spokes

Antique cars present great opportunities for photography composition using radial symmetry

The Mercedes museum in Stuttgart, Germany, provides a wealth of photo opportunities, provided you have a camera which works well at high ISO. I have a series of images taken of spoked wheels and finally settled on this one because it had the least background distraction (the challenge with spoked wheels is that you can see too much background between the spokes).

Even choosing this one, I encountered an important challenge. I get caught up in the excitement of the detail of industrial objects and don't want to leave anything out. As a result, I often forget my favorite cardinal rule, used by photographers everywhere: get close, then get closer.

If you look at the original photo to the right, you can see that this was a classic violation of the rule, which led to a boring photograph.

To arrive at the final image, above, I did some serious cropping, enhanced contrast to bring out the colors, and then sharpened the image.

Compare the visual impact of the two images. The final version has much better balance and a strong sense of motion because the wheel hub is off center and the spokes extend off the image edge.

Photo Critique

	This photo uses the rule of thirds to a 'T', then picks up visual motion from the spokes. For the most part, the background wheel and structure is in shadow, giving as good a separation of subject and background as you are likely to get with spoked wheels.
	I went through several cropping exercises to get the final image, and you can see that I only used about 25% of the area. Had I had the foresight to get the composition right in the camera, I would have captured four times the detail and been able to create a much larger final print than this image will produce.