[Part two of the Photography Fundamentals series, be sure to check out all 10 posts!]
After discovering that photography is really about light and shadow, the next step to producing great images is understanding composition. Really lighting and composition make up 90% of great photography.
Composition: The arrangement of items in your image; subject, background, environment etc.
It’s easy to forget about the position of things in your image. We tend to just assume that our camera is capturing what our eyes see and if the camera sees what our eyes see (and our eyes see a great image) then pressing the button will produce a great image.
FALSE!
The camera does not, in fact, see everything that your eyes see. It only sees a very small percentage through a small piece of glass and crams it all into some format (film or digital sensor).
Think of composition as reorganizing what your eyes see so that the camera can reproduce the image. Do you see a beautiful sunset in a huge sky? Don’t just point and shoot, position your sunset next to a sliver of shadowy horizon to emphasize its vastness.
Remember that the only rule for photography is that there are no rules. If it looks good it is good.
That said, here are a few “rules” to help you with your composition.
The Rule of Thirds: One of the most basic principles in photography is that you want to think of your image as divided into 9 parts, 3 horizontal and 3 vertical sections of equal proportion. Along these imaginary “lines” are where you will want to position objects in your frame.
One tendency, especially when photographing people, is to put your subject smack in the middle of the image. For some reason (known as the Golden Ratio) humans tend to find things that are proportioned according to the role of thirds aesthetically pleasing. Which means that picture you took of your fiancée in the middle of the image would look better if you had moved her to one side of the image.
[Bad Portrait]
[Good Portrait]
Balance: Offsetting the main focus of your image with another, less important object. Usually this means putting something in the background of your image that helps it feel less empty. When following the rule of thirds, it’s easy to end up with empty-feeling images.
Cropping: Reducing the amount of visual information in your image to focus on a single element.
[Unfocused]
[Focused]
Layering: Intentionally putting objects in the foreground (front) or background (behind) a subject gives an image depth and creates interest. It especially gives you the opportunity to make use of a shallow depth-of-field (more on that in a later post)..
[Fences are great for layering]
Framing: Using objects that appear in your image to create a natural “frame” around your subject. Architecture and landscape photography use this composition technique a lot.
Lines and Angles: Guide viewer’s eyes with naturally occurring lines and angles in your image. The human brain likes to follow trails in images and these can be used to create an effect. Use the rule of thirds to decide where your lines and angles should begin and end.
[Lines and Angles]
[Trails]
A good photographer will use these rules, one or all of them, to add interest to his pictures. The key is to remember to use the constraints of your camera and arrange objects in your image to create something people don’t see every day.
It’s also important to remember, like I said before, if it looks good, it is good. Rules were made to be broken.
[Part two of the Photography Fundamentals series, be sure to check out all 10 posts!]
[…] plus some extras that I happen to like.I’ll add links as each post shows up:Light and ShadowCompositionLightingOpticsCamera ControlsDepth of FieldColor PalateMaking a Moving PictureChoose Your […]