Composition

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If there’s one thing that sets photographers apart it’s composition. Some people appear to be born with an inbuilt sense of composition while others struggle all their photographic lives without mastering it. The mechanics of photography - focus and exposure - can be easily learned. Composition is much harder to pick up-and even harder to teach. A good starting point for most people is to think about it as “balance”. It’s an easier concept to grasp - and not just because it has half the syllables!

Bringing Harmony
Good composition achieves a balanced feel to a photograph. To an experienced eye, it’s a harmonious arrangement of the various elements within a scene. A quick way of checking for balance is to view the photograph upside down. If it still looks OK, then the chances are the composition is sound. Of course, there are photographers who delight in creating tension within a photograph by deliberately upsetting the balance but that’s best left to a later date once you’ve grasped the basic principles.

There are a variety of techniques that can be used to achieve balance within a photograph and compel the viewer to concentrate on what the photographer has selected as the centre of interest. These are:

* Golden Mean/Rule of Thirds
* Lead-in Lines
* Placement of the Horizon
* Wide Angle Perspective
* Telephoto Perspective
* De-cluttering

Let’s look at these in some more detail.

The Golden Mean
During the Renaissance, the concept of the Golden Mean took hold and is still wrongly promulgated by photographers today as the “rule of thirds”. The Golden Mean involved a mathematical formula that split the frame horizontally and vertically according to the expression:

The division of a given unit of length into two parts such that the ratio of the shorter to the longer equals the ratio of the longer part to the whole.

The object is to place key elements in the composition on or near the intersections of these lines. It’s a bit inflexible for photography where greater spontaneity is possible than in the art world but it’s still surprising how well balanced an image that complies with this “rule” can be.

The rule of thirds is wrongly believed by some photographers to be more or less interchangeable with the Golden Mean. In fact, a 1930s survey of art students found that most favoured the Golden Mean and most were against the rule of thirds. Notwithstanding that, as a quick and dirty way of placing elements in a camera viewfinder, the rule of thirds works well enough. As the name suggests, it simply involved dividing the frame vertically and horizontally into three equal parts and, again, concentrating the interesting elements around the intersections of those lines. For many subjects, these are safe rules to follow and it’s a good idea for those who are new to photography to stick to them for a while until their eye develops.

Lead-in Lines
A number of other tricks can be employed within this type of idea to make a photograph more accessible to viewers. The western eye scans from left to right and any lines leading in that direction give the eye something to follow. These can take the form of a footpath, the bend in a river, a wall, etc. The object is to position the line at the left hand side of the frame and allow it to lead the viewer to the principle subject placed at or nears its end. Wide angle lenses are particularly adept at emphasising this kind of perspective effect. It’s a technique that also gives a photograph more of a “3D” look.

Dividing the Frame
The position of the horizon in a photograph is also something that has to be carefully considered. A low horizon emphasises the sky and a horizon placed further up the frame will give more prominence to the foreground. There’s no point in having a large but uninteresting sky or foreground so only draw attention to those areas if there’s genuinely something worth looking at - a stormy sky or a colourful flowerbed might fit the bill. Generally speaking, and there can be exceptions, the worst place to place a horizon is right in the middle of the frame.

This gangway was only 30cm in width but the wide angle lens not only makes it appear larger where its close to the camera but also makes it look much longer than it is. That’s the wide angle perspective effect.

Perspective Effects
Perspective can be effectively used to aid composition and this can be altered by the choice of focal length. A wide angle lens will render objects in the foreground as large in comparison to a rapidly diminishing background-expanding perspective. It’s a way of emphasising near objects by showing them in relation to but not in competition with their surroundings.

Beginners mainly use wide angle lenses to “squeeze more into the pic” - say when they are indoors or photographing a large group of people - but their main benefit is in the perspective effect.

A telephoto lens achieves the opposite effect: it “compresses” perspective. Whereas the wide angle seems to increase the distance between near objects and the background, a tele lens appears to “stack” things together - almost like cutting the various elements out and sticking them onto a sheet of card. It more accurately shows the true size of an object or person in relation to their background.

Keep it Tidy
Composition also extends to “tidying up” an image. By this I mean ensuring that there are no distracting elements poking their way into the photograph. These can be part of a street sign, a person entering or leaving the scene, cars, etc. Before pressing the shutter, just take a moment to scan the image for those unwanted elements.

Learn from the Masters
As I touched on in the section on street photography, I think the best way of learning the art of composition is to study great photographs. Looking at photographs, in fact not just “looking” but “really looking”, is the way to develop the eye. I’ve no scientific evidence for this but I believe that looking at great photographs encourages a kind of pattern recognition to develop in the brain: you subconsciously absorb the elements that make a picture appeal to you. Armed with these “templates”, you’ll start to notice photographs you wouldn’t have seen before. Note that this isn’t the same as copying someone else’s photography: it’s a way of applying compositional and tonal strengths to the scene in front of you and making something coherent out of it. The more you think about outstanding photography like this, the more you will start to recognise, in everyday life around you, the potential for good – if not great – photographs.

Axel Bruck:
"Photographs are an 'optical' language. The properties of the subject matter and the scope of the photographic techniques employed constitute the vocabulary of this language.

"This leaves us with composition as the 'grammar' of this language, whose structure provides us with ways and means to make significant statements in the language of photography."


Copyright © 2008 Paris Travelogue

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