Welcome back to our first full Photography Simplified lesson. Today we will begin our discussion on Photographic Composition. We’ll start with a brief overview of what composition is all about and then we will start our exploration of the tools you can use to improve the composition in your photos. I’m calling this series Photography Simplified, because my goal is to take some of the more complex or intimidating parts of photography and bringing them down to Earth. I’m not saying that photography is simple, its not. It is a skill, actually a set of skills that take time and work and patience to learn. At its most basic level, making photographs involves just two skills, composition and exposure. So lets get started with composition.
What is Composition?
Easy. Composition is simply the arrangement of elements in the frame. How things in your photo are arranged determines how people will view your photo and more importantly how long people will look at your photo. Think about it, the longer someone looks at your photo, the better the photo. Have you ever gotten your prints back from a roll of film? (I know, I know we’re all digital now, just work with me) You flip through your prints and quickly pass the bad and the boring, but you linger over the ones you like. Even if only for a fraction of a second longer. So your goal with taking better pictures is to get people, even if that person is just yourself, to look at your pictures longer. Start with fractions of a second longer and work your way up to full seconds, then minutes, then hours and all the way up to a full semester of college students pondering how you captured the meaning of life in a black and white photo of a weed in your backyard. It could happen. So the question becomes ‘how do I use composition to make people look at my photos longer? Good question.
Mr. Sulu, you have the Con.
Step one. Take control of your photos. Up until now you probably just pointed the camera in the general direction of what you want to take a picture of and pushed the shutter button. No more, from now on you are going to think about what you are pointing at and you will begin to see that everything in the frame matters. When you look through the viewfinder or on the LCD, don’t just look at your subject. Take a moment and look at everything in that frame, your subject, the background, the foreground, everything. At first this may seem a little slow and awkward, but the more you do it the faster and more subconscious it will become. You will probably find that in some cases you have already done this before. In the last lesson, I asked you to find the 10 best pictures you have ever previously taken. Look at them now, go ahead, I’ll wait. Ready? Good. Now I want you to look at your best photos and see if you applied the following composition basics.
1. A clear definable subject – You should be able to take one look at the photo and instantly know why you made the picture.
2. No distracting elements – Is there anything in the frame that draws your eye away from your subject? If so, does it add to the information we have about the subject or does it distract us from the subject.
That’s it, pretty simple right? So you probably found at least of few, if not all, of your best pictures accomplished those two tasks, clear subject, no distractions. They may seem like accidents to you now, but it just proves that you are capable of applying the rules of composition, you just don’t know what all the rules are. You are about to find out what they are, but before we start with the rules I must point out that, as my favorite Caribbean pirates would say, the rules are more like guidelines. Don’t follow every one every time. That gets boring. In fact some of the greatest photos ever made were done by breaking the rules, but before you break them you have to know what they are.
Next time…The Rules of Compostion (they’re more like guidelines)
