subject: Mastering The Art Of Photo Composition [print this page] Mastering The Art Of Photo Composition Mastering The Art Of Photo Composition
One of the most important things a photographer can carry in their bag is a firm understanding of the basic elements of photography. A picture is not just a piece of photo paper, but the result of thousands of tiny variables coming together all at once. Understanding these different elements and how you can use them to take better images is critical to your success as a photographer. One of the most important of these elements is composition.
The Definition of Composition
Composition is the way in which the subjects or objects of your picture interact with each other. You can think of it simply as where each object in a picture shows up in the frame and can also include things such as depth of field, focus and zoom.
When a picture has great composition it tells a clear story but when the composition is bad, the picture becomes less appealing. One easy way to see if a photo has poor composition is to see if it looks boring or has nothing of interest in the image.
The Components of Composition
Once you learn how to use these helpful rules of composition, you can get amazing results. While these rules are by no means concrete and in photography breaking rules is often more fun than following them, they should serve to give you a baseline for understanding composition's impact on your shoots.
The Rule of Thirds
The Rule of Thirds is based on the artistic assumption that humans are naturally inclined to look at the point of an image that falls about two-thirds up from the bottom. If you imagine a photograph cut into nine equal squares, your subject should fall as close to one of their intersections as possible. Whenever you shoot, imagine these lines across your frame and try and line the shots up accordingly (horizons especially show great results).
Image Balance
Although this isn't an official photography rule, it's good to remember when taking pictures. Placing your subjects off-center in your frame will often help to keep the Rule of Thirds, but be sure that you aren't creating a vacuum of empty space around that subject. Whenever possible, try to balance important parts of an image with less important parts for example, a photograph of a child running through grass would be more interesting if they were near one side of the frame, and where they were running was at the other.
The Power of Lines
Our eyes are naturally drawn to lines. We are constantly tracing images with our minds, and you can use this to your advantage. When lining up a shot, look for lines in the frame and ask yourself if they lead to important parts of your image. If the lines don't do that, the viewer's eyes will trace the lines only to be left unsatisfied that the lines lead to nowhere.
The Power of Cropping
Sometimes what you leave out of your picture can be as important as what you leave in. Every time you pick up a camera, you should be cropping it in your mind and get rid of extraneous stuff that distracts from the picture's story. There are ways to fix this using software or in the darkroom but try to correct it by cropping before you take the picture.
Composition is one of the elements of photography that takes years to master. Since composition is a combination of several different elements, it will always present a constant challenge to even the most knowledgeable photographer. Follow the basic rules until you understand how they work, then dare yourself to break them.
