Lets Get Fibonacci With It
This is version 2.0 of an ever changing document.
Fibonacci numbers, the golden ratio and PHI have become very well known because of the book The Da Vinci Code, but I have been using them for a while in my photography and I decided to show how. This is a little guide to taking interesting formal pictures using Fibonacci proportioned shapes as a guide to composition.
Cheat Sheet
I took this image of a rectangle made up of fibonacci sized squares from a wikipedia article about fibonacci numbers and I rotated it 90 degrees to use as a template. My suggestion is that you print it onto a transparency so that you can look through it when you are shooting.
I like it when the content in block 8 is very different than in the other blocks. Blocks 1,2, and 5 should have interesting items or themes in them. You can mirror this and turn it upside down, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be exact either, and to be honest, you will go crazy if you try to make it exact.
Examples
In photoshop I took the cheat sheet above and then applied it over two of my favorite images. As it turns out the senser in my digital camera (Pentax *DS) is not proportioned to work perfectly with this diagram therefore my examples are not 100% exact. I also forgot to make sure you could read the numbers. (oops)
Example #1: I am trying to break your heart
This is a river in White River Junction, VT.
I chose to fill two thirds of the image with the cement in order to form a shape that corresponds roughly to block 8 on the fibonacci diagram. The bottom third of the image needed to be more than just water to be interesting, so I chose to include the rock to help define an area that would correspond to block 5.
Example #2: Haverhill Town Hall
This is the abandoned town hall of a small agricultural town in northern New Hampshire. I wanted the top two thirds of this image to be about the texture of the brick and the bottom third to be about the differences in texture between the stone and the brick. I set up the corner of the building so that the bottom third of the image was itself divided into thirds vertically by the stone square that forms a block 5. I then wanted that third to be divided again into thirds by the stone and the brick.
