After you have grown your ability to make decisions about exposure, you’ll want to start considering more seriously what you’re pointing your camera at, or rather, where and how you choose to point it.
Composition is simply the organization of objects inside your image. Where you choose to put everything in a frame. When you can’t move your subject (like photographing the Gateway Arch, for example), composition is changed by moving your camera.
I put the word rules in quotes for the title of this section because rules is kind of an extreme word in the art world. Artists, though they should always learn fundamentals and know the roots of their medium, have the benefit of what is called artistic license. Artistic license means it is the artist’s discretion to make decisions about his or her creation. Why didn’t DaVinci give the Mona Lisa a bigger grin? Or something as minuscule as giving her one more eyelash? Those were his choices as an artist.
Composition can be approached in many, many ways. A number of books have been written on composition alone. My decision in this primer is to give you what I believe are five of the most essential techniques. Of these five, the first two are fairly specific and the last three are more general guidelines.
For me, composition is important because when people look at my images, I want them to have a good, positive, comfortable experience, I want them to like whatever they are looking at. Maybe manipulation has a negative connotation, but the rules of composition enable a photographer to push a viewers eye to a specific place in the frame without them even realizing it. If you think that’s sneaky, consider that marketers do it to you about a thousand times a day to get you to buy things. This may or may not be about sales when it comes to photography, but more than that, it’s about the experience of the viewer.
Every composition article or book you ever read will likely contain, if not start with the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is very basic. It dictates that an image can be divided into three parts vertically and horizontally (visualize a tic-tac-toe board on top of an image) and the most important part of that image should fall on one of those lines or where the lines intersect.
The next technique is filling the frame or close cropping. They mean what they sound like. The image is filled with the subject, in the case below, the subject is an overgrown concrete stairwell. This technique leaves a lot to the imagination because very little context is given. Where are the stairs on the previous page leading up to, an abandoned house? Is the surrounding foliage part of a large overgrowth or are they just a few isolated weeds? The mind wanders with a lack of guidance, which can give a viewer an ethereal feeling as they project their own perception of the story behind the image onto it.
The next three concepts are much more vague in terms of definition, they are symmetry, balance and depth.
Balance and symmetry can go hand in hand. One possible benefit of symmetry is that it makes us feel comfortable; there is a completeness to the image. Another way to use symmetry is to use it to draw attention to an object that makes the image slightly asymmetrical. Imagine an image of two windows on the front of a house. They are exactly the same, and on equally opposite sides of the image, but a cat sits in one of the windows and not the other. The cat would be very accentuated because it is the only thing asymmetrical about the image. Any viewer would immediately gravitate their eyes to the cat because their brain would identify it subconsciously as the outlier in the otherwise symmetrical image.
As much as balance pretty much always goes with symmetry, symmetry is not always involved when balance is present.
The image below would be an example of asymmetrical balance. There is nothing majorly symmetrical about the image, but the prominent structures – prominent in my opinion because the tower reaches high into the sky, even above of the mountain range behind, and the big pot also touches the sky and is of bold color – are equal in number and distributed evenly, one on each side of the frame. By that, I mean that five towers on the right and one pot on the left would not be considered balanced. Imagine the photograph without the pot. It would still be a good image, but nothing would contend with the tower for your attention. Maybe that would be more desirable for a particular purpose (the tower is a landmark, for example), maybe it would be less desirable if tension between the two is desired. With the pot there, your eyes are not tempted to stop only on the tower, they move back through the image. Because the majority of the architecture in the image is monochrome it blends in, and thus needs the presence of the pot on the other side of the frame to draw any attention.
Depth, the final concept of this section has to do with making a two-dimensional image reveal the three-dimensional quality of the real life it captures.
Depth is revealed by incorporating objects in the foreground, middle ground, and background of an image. Consider the image below. It’s a little bit of a tricky one because reflection is at play. The foreground object is what is closest to the viewer. In this image, even though they are small, it is the droplets of rain on the window. If they weren’t what the camera focused on, we might not even notice they are there.
The background contains the buildings in the reflection, surely the girl is closer than they. That leaves the red-lipped lady in the middle ground. We are able to conceptualize the reflection in the image and know where the foreground, middle ground, and background are in the image. The way this photo reveals depth was very creatively conceived.
These composition techniques are a few of the many that are out there. If you want a little more variety in the “rules” department, look up the golden ratio, or the golden triangle composition. We’ll deviate from rules a bit: the next few sections are all about what to look for so you can recognize what will attract and move the eyes of your viewers when they look at your images, the first of these is LINE.
For an artist who uses brushes, pencils or pens, lines are one of the most basic and essential elements. A photographer is only different because he doesn’t create the lines, he finds them and observes what they can do for a composition.
There are three major kinds of lines, leading lines, curves, and implied lines. Though leading lines generally come from “outside” a frame, all of these types of lines serve the purpose of giving the eye of the viewer a path to follow, further directing their attention to its intended destination.
Lines also have the ability to communicate a particular notion. Looking at the prior few paragraphs, the lines tell us that we are going somewhere. A chair lift ride is a fairly common experience, and we draw on that experience subconsciously when we see the lines disappear into the fog. Lines that cross and twist at hard angles can communicate chaos, or entrapment. The quantity of lines, their angular nature seem aggressive. Diagonals tend to communicate instability: think “leaning tower of Pisa.” Conversely, straight lines tend to suggest stability, like a horizon. Verticals can be indicative of stability as well if they are truly vertical and not skewed by perspective or lens distortion.Highly angular lines also create tension because they seem unnatural.
The compliment to angles is curves. Curves can be quite soothing, organic, and natural-looking. See at the image on the following page. The rock formed by wind-erosion has created shallow, subtle waves. The eye moves across them smoothly, sweeping from one curve to the next. With the rope image, the eye darts from intersection to intersection, causing visual unrest.
Curves can look very different, but they are generally classified as C curves or S curves. In the image above, I would classify most as S curves, though some are subtle than others. The road in the image here has a more obvious S curve, despite a bit of it being obstructed by leaves. The benefit the curve in that image is that the image has enough context to point your eye toward something. If you follow the road from the bottom of the frame all the way through to the white car, you almost can’t help but be pointed directly to the red-roofed house that stands out of the tree line. This is a good example of using an S curve as a leading line.
The third type of line is implied line. Implied lines aren’t really there, but they work in the same ways leading lines do, directing your eye. They usually come in the form of a pattern of some sort or a succession of shapes that your eye follows.
Consider the image above of the surfer walking at twilight. There is an implied line from the sign at the top left corner to the base of the building on the right. The implied line moves your eye from the rectangular sign to the triangular sign, from the triangular sign to the surfer and through his board. The board is more of a line than the signs, and may very well be enhancing their ability to be part of the line. The surfers legs are similar to the posts holding up the signs, at least in the sense that they are thinner than what they are holding up.
Though I am not specifically committing a section of this book to shape, this would be a good example of it since silhouette makes everything into shape. As you probably learned before the first grade, shape happens when lines connect. The reason I don’t give it much attention is because I personally do not look for shape when I compose: paying attention to lines around me is generally enough to get me to notice a shape. One may catch my eye from time to time, but I don’t generally notice or go looking for them explicitly.
Look through all previous chapters and look how line plays a role in leading your eye through images. Many of the other images incorporate line in a powerful way. In fact, I think it would be a helpful exercise for you to do that with every new chapter’s sections from here on out. After you read through every chapter, look back and see how the principles in that chapter are at play in other chapters.
What I know you will find is that strong images employ a number of techniques simultaneously to get your eye moving to a specific place. If you do this, you will start to be able to describe just why an image has a strong composition.
Next, check out: Trick the brain with these key eye catching techniques!
**If you’re interested in treating these posts as a self-study with assignments, you can get our Assignment Series 1 question pack to help you learn these ideas through real, targeted, hands-on practice. The Assignment Series 1 question pack is included with enrollment in our beginner’s course.**
