Simplifying Composition : The Elemental Components of a Landscape

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In this book, Bruce Percy covers all the major aspect ratios such as 3: But most importantly, he illustrates through his own photography, how the aspect ratio of your camera dictates how you lay your compositions out.

He also illustrates how the 35mm aspect ratio of 3: Read more Read less. Kindle Cloud Reader Read instantly in your browser. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. The Elemental Components of a Landscape. Sponsored products related to this item What's this? Peanut Butter and Passports: Tom Gose brings readers along on his travels to various places around the world.

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Simplifying Composition: The Elemental Components of a Landscape

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The optical illusion of lines do exist in nature and visual arts elements can be arranged to create this illusion. The viewer unconsciously reads near continuous arrangement of different elements and subjects at varying distances. Such elements can be of dramatic use in the composition of the image. These could be literal lines such as telephone and power cables or rigging on boats.

Lines can derive also from the borders of areas of differing color or contrast, or sequences of discrete elements. Movement is also a source of line, and blur can also create a reaction. Subject lines contribute to both mood and linear perspective , giving the viewer the illusion of depth. Oblique lines convey a sense of movement and angular lines generally convey a sense of dynamism and possibly tension. Lines can also direct attention towards the main subject of picture, or contribute to organization by dividing it into compartments.

The artist may exaggerate or create lines perhaps as part of their message to the viewer. Many lines without a clear subject point suggest chaos in the image and may conflict with the mood the artist is trying to evoke. Straight left lines create different moods and add affection to visual arts. A line's angle and its relationship to the size of the frame influence the mood of the image. Horizontal lines, commonly found in landscape photography , can give the impression of calm, tranquility, and space.

An image filled with strong vertical lines tends to have the impression of height and grandeur. Tightly angled convergent lines give a dynamic, lively, and active effect to the image. Strongly angled, almost diagonal lines produce tension in the image. The viewpoint of visual art is very important because every different perspective views different angled lines. This change of perspective elicits a different response to the image. By changing the perspective only by some degrees or some centimetres lines in images can change tremendously and a totally different feeling can be transported.

Straight lines are also strongly influenced by tone, color, and repetition in relation to the rest of the image. Compared to straight lines, curves provide a greater dynamic influence in a picture. They are also generally more aesthetically pleasing, as the viewer associates them with softness. In photography, curved lines can give graduated shadows when paired with soft-directional lighting, which usually results in a very harmonious line structure within the image.

There are three properties of color. Hue, brightness, and value. Hue is simply the name of a color, red, yellow, and blue, etc. Brightness refers to the intensity and strength of the color. The lightness and darkness to a color is the value. Color also has the ability to work within our emotions. Given that, we can use color to create mood. It can also be used as tone, pattern, light, movement, symbol, form, harmony, and contrast.

Composition (visual arts)

Texture refers to how an object feels or how it looks like it may feel if it were touched. There are two ways we experience texture, physically and optically. Different techniques can be used to create physical texture, which allows qualities of visual art to be seen and felt. This can include surfaces such as metal, sand, and wood.

Optical texture is when the illusion of physical texture is created. Photography, paintings, and drawings use visual texture to create a more realistic appearance. Lightness and darkness is what creates value in visual art. Value deals with how light reflects off of objects and how we see it. The more light, the higher the value. White is the highest or lightest value while black is the lowest or darkest value.

Colors also have value, for example, yellow has a high value while blue has a low value. This is a very important element of design, especially in painting and drawing, to be able to create the illusion of light with contrast. Contrast is needed to understand two-dimensional artwork. The term form can be mean different things in visual art.

However, there are concerns that more simplified cropland with lower crop diversity, less noncrop habitat, and larger fields results in increased use of pesticides due to a lack of natural pest control and more homogeneous crop resources. Here, we use data on crop production and insecticide use from over , field-level observations from Kern County, California, encompassing the years — to test if crop diversity, field size, and cropland extent affect insecticide use in practice.

Overall, we find that higher crop diversity does reduce insecticide use, but the relationship is strongly influenced by the differences in crop types between diverse and less diverse landscapes. Further, we find insecticide use increases with increasing field size. The effect of cropland extent is distance-dependent, with nearby cropland decreasing insecticide use, whereas cropland further away increases insecticide use.

This refined spatial perspective provides unique understanding of how different components of landscape simplification influence insecticide use over space and for different crops. Agriculture has increased to meet the demand of a growing and wealthier population that demands more, and more resource intensive, calories 1. The doubling of agricultural production in the past 40 y has been fueled by technological improvements as well as higher levels of pesticide and fertilizer inputs 2. Although this increase in food production has contributed to vast improvements in nutrition and reductions in hunger worldwide 2 , 3 , the ecological and environmental consequences of these inputs are straining the long-term viability of agricultural systems 1 and the human and natural communities that surround agricultural production 4 , 5.

Agricultural intensification at both local on-farm and landscape regional scales has been the workhorse behind production increases. Farms have become specialized on fewer, high-yielding crops grown in shorter rotation cycles on larger fields 6. In aggregate, agricultural landscapes have become more simplified with less noncrop habitat and fewer crop types in production 6. Aggregate food production from intensification has undoubtedly increased, reducing the pressure of agricultural land expansion into natural habitats to meet the growing food demand 7. Modern agricultural systems rely on agrochemicals to reduce pest damage, thereby minimizing crop loss However, many of these chemicals have adverse environmental and ecological effects.

Pesticides, broadly, and insecticides, in particular, have been linked to biodiversity declines in numerous taxa in both temperate and tropical regions 13 , 14 , as well as declines in water and air quality. Further, off-site pesticide contamination and pesticide resistance are important externalities of pesticide use that have consequences for both chronic and infectious human diseases. Pesticide use is fundamentally about controlling pest damage. Crops can vary substantially in average insecticide use based on value or susceptibility to pest damage.

However, given the set of crops in production, ecologists are seeking means to reduce excess insecticide use by manipulating on-farm and landscape characteristics. Because insect pests and natural enemies often have large dispersal ranges and varied habitat needs, the focus has been on if and when complex landscapes reduce pest abundance or, conversely, if and when simplified landscapes lead to more pest problems However, ecological field studies seeking to inform more sustainable pest control practices face an enormous challenge.

Pest community composition and pest damage may be intricately linked to landscape composition, habitat configuration, and the focal crop type in ways and at spatial scales that are difficult to address in field experiments. As a result, the evidence tying simplified habitats to insecticide use is often specific to one crop and pest combination e.

Data-driven approaches have proven useful in elucidating the larger scale patterns in the relationship between landscape-level agricultural intensification and insecticide use 18 , However, these studies have been limited in spatial resolution of both crop 20 and insecticide data Thus, the majority of research has focused on one aspect of landscape simplification, namely, cropland extent measured as the proportion of county in cropland.

In highly simplified agricultural regions that are dominated by one or a couple of crops, county-level cropland may serve as an appropriate metric for intensification. However, in highly diverse agricultural regions, landscape-level crop diversity, in addition to cropland extent, may be an important driver of pests and enemies 22 , Further, cropland extent may act on both local field size and landscape landscape composition scales.

Disentangling such complexities requires refined data on crops and insecticides at large spatial scales, information that is currently absent for much of the world. Although the leading crops by value are grape varieties and almonds, over different commodities are produced We first conduct the analysis pooling all crops to understand general patterns in insecticide use and landscape simplification using panel data analyses that control for regional differences in insecticide use as well as for year shocks in pest control. Because crops are not planted haphazardly, we then use crop-specific controls i.

Using these models, we evaluate if crop diversity, field size, or cropland extent drives insecticide use.

Further, we test whether the effect of diversity is dependent on the classification and taxonomic level at which diversity is measured. More taxonomically similar crops may be expected to share more pests, yet taxonomically similar crops can be used for very different products e.

We therefore calculate diversity at different taxonomic levels to understand better which, if any, is most relevant for pest control decisions. For each of these crops, we again evaluate the influence of diversity, field size, and cropland extent on the magnitude of pesticide applications. In general, we find that increasing crop diversity reduces insecticide use per hectare, whereas increasing field size increases insecticide use.

These relationships, as well as the relationship between cropland extent and insecticide use, are strongly influenced by crop type. We conducted all analyses at the field scale. SDI was calculated at different taxonomic levels species, genus, and family or commodity levels commodity and agricultural class. Unless otherwise noted, the results discussed below are from models based on SDI at the species level. To facilitate comparison, all covariates were standardized.

Map of insecticides A , crop diversity calculated at species B , cropland extent C , and mean field size D by a 2.

For all maps, darker colors indicate larger values and the four colors represent quartiles in the distribution. Throughout, we are following the econometric use of the term fixed effects to describe panel data models with dummy or indicator variables for each crop, year, or region. Similar to demeaning of the dependent variable, this method uses only the variation in the data that is not explained by differences in pesticide use between years, regions, or crop types i.

In contrast, the pooled OLS model clumps all observations together and does not distinguish unobservable differences in crops, years, or regions. However, crops differ dramatically in average insecticide use Table 1 , and failing to control for these differences may bias the statistical estimation.

In other words, the effects observed may be driven by differences in crop types in highly diverse versus less diverse areas, not by diversity per se. To control for the possibility that farmers plant low-insecticide crops in highly diverse crop landscapes, we included crop type dummy variables crop fixed effects to compare how insecticide use varies with cropland diversity, extent, and field size for a given crop Methods. We also tested models with regional fixed effects to account for roughly time-invariant characteristics, such as soil quality or cultural norms, that are shared by all fields in a region.

Here, region was defined by the km 2 Public Land Survey Township. Annual variability in insecticides e. As such, we included year dummy variables in both the crop and region fixed effects models. Effect of crop diversity on insecticides is influenced by crop-specific characteristics and the taxonomic scale at which diversity is calculated.

Including crop fixed effects FE; dummy variables C dramatically reduced the magnitude of the estimated coefficient relative to the pooled OLS model A , and relative to the model with regional km 2 PLS Township and year fixed effects B , indicating that diversity and crop type are correlated.

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Generally, the estimated effect of diversity, calculated as the diversity of crops grown within a 2,m radius of the focal field, decreased in magnitude as the grouping at which diversity was calculated became more aggregated. For all figures, the y axis is the size of the slope coefficient change in insecticide use, in kilograms per hectare. Error bars that cross the horizontal zero line indicate a nonsignificant relationship. Effect of crop diversity, cropland extent, and field size for different model specifications. Across the different all-crop models, the estimated effect of diversity decreased with taxonomic level.

The effect of diversity calculated at the species or genus level had an estimated relationship roughly twice the magnitude as diversity calculated at the family level Fig. Average field level insecticide use across all crops and years is For all models, the coefficients for diversity calculated at genus and commodity followed a similar pattern to the coefficients for diversity calculated at the species level.

In contrast, the larger aggregations of family and agricultural class had diversity coefficients of smaller magnitude relative to species Fig. Coefficients for crop diversity A , cropland extent B , and field size C in the pooled OLS solid circle , region, and year fixed effects open circle and in cropland and year fixed effects X models. For all models, unless otherwise noted, crop diversity and cropland extent are based on a circle area with a radius of 2, m from the focal field.

To explore the heterogeneity over space, we evaluated diversity and cropland extent in five concentric circles of m distances from the focal field, creating five annuli at distances of 0— m, —1, m, 1,—1, m, 1,—2, m, and 2,—2, m. We again included crop and year fixed effects. The average field size was 33 ha; thus, the smallest annuli was about 2.

We find an important distance component to our results. Crop diversity hints at a nonlinear pattern over space, with diversity decreasing insecticide use at m and 1, m, but not at 1, m. After 1, m, the relationship is smaller, it is marginally not significant at 2, m, and it is nonsignificant at 2, m Fig. Effect of crop diversity A and cropland extent B is heterogeneous over space. The y axis is the size of the covariate—insecticides relationship. Crop and year fixed effects are included. Heterogeneity in the effect of crop diversity and cropland extent at increasing distance from the focal crop field.

The relationship between landscape simplification and insecticides could alternatively be affected by economic changes that ultimately drive the simplification. For example, larger farms i. To test the impact of farm structure on insecticide use, we tested models that included a covariate for the proportion of the surrounding area owned by the owner of the focal field.

However, including this variable did not change the patterns we observed for crop diversity, field size, or cropland extent, indicating that ownership was not driving our results. Other economic factors, such as crop and pesticide prices, certainly also affect pesticide use; however, because the relevant prices become observable only after the land use decision, they add to the noise but do not bias the estimates. Nevertheless, we also evaluated crop-by-year fixed effects models to account for year shocks that may be unique to individual crops e.

Doing so did not change the patterns observed in the crop and year fixed effects model Table S1. We again included year fixed effects, in this case, to account for year-specific shocks shared by all fields of the focal crop e.

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As anticipated, there was substantial heterogeneity across the different crops. Surprisingly, the crops for which diversity had little effect on insecticides were also the crops for which surrounding cropland extent led to an increase in insecticides. However, for crops such as grapes and pistachios, the coefficients were near zero and nonsignificant. Carrot was the only crop of the top six to have a negative coefficient i. Components of landscape simplification by top insecticide use crops. Diversity A and extent B have variable effects on insecticide use.

Crops with a strong response to diversity have muted responses to extent, and vice versa.

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