Bernini's Baldachin, Saint Peter's Basilica, Vatican City

Photograph Copyright ©2012 Loo Yen Yeo. All Rights Reserved.

Concept: Placement (secondary point of interest); Placement (subject vector); Triangles (vertical convergence)

Description: Gianlorenzo Bernini's baldacchino towers twenty metres over the main altar, and yet is dwarfed by Michelangelo's dome more than a hundred metres above it. This shot captures the detail of Bernini's design - the helical columns based on the legend of those from Solomon's temple, and the flaring dove of the Holy Spirit - with heavy use of diagonals to maintain the writhing energy. The dynamic off-centre placement is balanced by the Medallion of Saint John the Evangelist in the spandrel, top-right.

Taken close-up with a wide-angle lens, the helical spin of the bronze columns create a vector upwards to convergence point (the dome's lantern) just out of frame i.e. a vertical triangle was implied to give a sense of scale.

Title: The Dove and the Eagle

01.04 Placement

If a decision is made not to fill the frame - that is, to show the subject in its context - it becomes important to consider where the subject should placed in the image frame so that it best communicates its relationship with its setting. As the subject decreases in size, its context increases in importance, and therefore the more crucial is the subject's placement. The most obvious placement is in the centre, but this generally makes for a static, unyielding picture; and yet locating the subject to an extreme point, while dynamic, can come across as eccentric or contrived unless there is clear reason for it.

In practice, the communicative-aesthetic placement of the subject can be justified by:

• a second point of interest or evidence of it (if out of shot) such as the sun and direction of sunlight, or
• a vector, like the subject's direction of motion or way it faces.