Category: Composition

To illustrate a holiday tradition that my family has, I took a photograph of one of our wrapped Christmas presents. A simple holiday tradition in my family has always been to open wrapped Christmas presents on Christmas morning. For this prompt, I decided to photograph a present that was wrapped in a way creating balance. The bell in the top left corner and the sticker in the bottom right create balance due to their similar red color and positioning. The addition of the gold ribbons adds to the asymmetrical balanced composition. Overall, the photograph is composed in a way that draws attention through the usage of balance.

In this image, I photographed subtle symmetry in a natural landscape. While exploring the Baylands Nature Preserve, I was originally looking for perfect symmetry using the reflections of the environment in the water. However, I quickly found that exact symmetry is not as interesting to look at as subtle symmetry, which is noticeable but doesn’t take away from the composition itself. This photo has implications of both translational symmetry as it depicts four repeated trees, and reflectional symmetry because the left and right sides of the photo are mirror images of each other.