Welcome to the seventh meeting of the Eden Photographers Club! I hope everyone had a good month of thinking about photography and looking at the world through a photographer’s eyes. I want to thank all of you who are here tonight. With summer winding down and autumn rapidly approaching, I would hope all of us have had more photography.

This is usually the place where I'd implore all of you to submit photos to the Eden Photographers tumblr site, but that has gotten so little use, that I'm not going to press the issue so much. It will remain open for any of you who desire to do so to post photos for critiquing, but I am hoping that critiquing will take place in these meetings going forward. All of you who have participated in the critiquing over the past couple months in these meetings have done a wonderful job, so I hope all of you will be comfortable posting one of your photos later during this meeting for everyone to give a quick critique.
First, though, I'll go through a quick tutorial on how you can use negative space to your advantage.

Before we get started, is there anything anybody wanted to bring up about photography or the club? less

OK, moving on, then.....

I posted a poll a few weeks ago about what you wanted the topic of this meeting to me, and the winner was using negative space to your advantage. Negative space is the portion of a photo that is relatively devoid of features or contrasting colors. Most photos have some amount of negative space and that’s not necessarily a…well…negative. Photos that work really well and that have a lot of negative space do so because the photo is as much about the negative space as it is about the subject. To put it another way, negative space can be put to good use of it puts the subject in perspective. Negative space can be a powerful tool in your photographic arsenal if it is an integral part of telling the story of the photo.

Prior to going over an example of how negative space can be a positive, let's look at a photo where it is a negative.



There's nothing wrong with this image, per se. The blade of grass is nicely in focus, the exposure is right, and the raindrops on the grass nicely reflects the colors of the mountain meadow in the (blurred) background). However, there is a TON on negative space, and it does absolutely nothing for the photo. The subject of the photo is the grass and the raindrops, and the negative space doesn't add to the photo. It isn't part of the story. It's just distracting (in the amount that is in this photo, anyway).

Did that make sense? less