Composition #1 - Keep it Simple
The text books will all tell you that there are a number
of rules for composing a photograph (or a painting for that matter) and it
isn't a bad idea to follow these rules 90% of the time. Working on a newspaper
has taught me that simple compositions often work the best and that there
are several ways of keeping it simple. One of my favourites is to work with
a small depth of field. The human eye will always be drawn to the subject
that is in sharp focus with a simple out of focus background. Usually this
will mean that the background doesn't contribute to the image, but every
so often an out of focus background forms a really important part of the image.
This picture of four year old boy at a kindergarten learning about the creatures that live in the garden is a perfect illustration of how throwing the background out of focus gives an enormous boost to the composition and helps to tell the story of the image. The snail is in focus, but because the lens (180mm on a 70-200 f2.8 zoom) was wide open at f2.8 the boy becomes an interesting blur. The added 1.6x focal length multiplication brought no change in the depth of field but narrowed the angle down to a 35mm equivalent of 288mm. On this particularly sunny day that meant a shutter speed of 1/4000th of a second on 200 ISO. Techniques are there to be used, altered, modified and adapted. This one should become really useful to you once you have mastered it. When you are struggling to make an interesting composition it's always worth considering narrowing your depth of field.
Six
feet up is bad
Composition #2 - Six feet up is bad
It is very easy to hold the camera to your eye and take a picture. Good photography
requires us all to think about where we are taking the picture from as well
as what we are taking. The best photographs are made when the photographer
chooses a vantage point to suit the subject, and it is surprising how few
subjects are suited by the height of a human standing at their full five to
six feet. This is compounded by the fact that when
someone views the image they will see pretty much what they themselves would
have taken because they haven't been told about bending your knees or climbing
a ladder to shoot better pictures.
It is no accident that many of the world's best photographers wear denims most of the time, and I take pride in the fact that I spend so much of my time kneeling that I have "housemaids knee". Sooner or later I will end up flat on my face or up on a chair to give something extra to a composition - namely a point of view that the person looking at the image would not have seen themself.
This
image was shot in the beautiful University City of Oxford on a Canon G1 using
the swivel LCD to get the camera at ground level without having to lie in
the dirt myself. The lens was less that two inches from the
cobble stones and this ultra low angle gives the image a dynamic quality that
would have been missing had I been standing at my full five foot ten inches.
The photograph is different from most pictures taken of this
tourist magnet and I'm sure that my antics were the reason for the puzzled
look on the passer by's face.
My
point is that when you get your camera out think about the height of the lens.
If you end up shooting from a standing position, well that's OK - but I will
lay good money that 90% of pictures are better when taken
from below four feet or over seven.
Composition
#3 - Use a Frame
Keeping the viewer's interest within the confines of the edges of a photograph
is not a simple task. There has been a lot of research into "Joe Average"
and his attention span and the news for us photographers is
not good. We have to use a selection of techniques to keep our viewer looking
at our image for as long as it takes for him or her to understand what we
were trying to say.
One
of the simplest ways to hold attention into a picture is to incorporate a
frame into the image. This photograph uses a none too subtle window in a child's
playhouse to form a border - a kind of psychological
barrier to the straying eye. All kinds of things can help with this task in
compositional terms and because of the left to right, top to bottom bias with
which we westerners read everything the top and right are the
most in need of our help. Windows, doors, abstract shapes, blocks of colour
and shadows can all perorm this elementary optical trick but there bis rarely
an absolute need for the bottom of the photograph to have a retaining feature.
There are some other basic rules that may well be worth remembering too (all rules in photography can be broken) - such as avoiding having people looking out of a frame or cutting through joints on human (or animal) limbs. It's best to avoid having pointless details on the edge of a photograph or having the brightest point in a corner.
Like everything in photography, the best way to learn is to a). have a go, b).get it wrong and c).learn from your own mistakes. Digital photography gives us un-precedented opportunities to experiment at little or no cost, playing with elements of composition is one of the most useful and rewwarding things to practice.
Have
an Eye For Detail
Composition #4 - Have an Eye For Detail
The choice between taking the same photograph as everyone else and standing
back and getting something different becomes a matter of survival when you
work on a weekly newspaper and the other five photographers around you will
be publishing the next morning. Even if that weren't the dilemma of every
photocall I go to, I like to think that as a photographer I am an individual.
It's a pretty useful mindset to sign up to, no matter how much or little photography
you do.
This
photograph of an elephant's eye is a classic example of taking a mental step
back from the herd and shooting something different. It is also an advertisement
for having more than one camera with different
lenses on. There were five other photographers at the job. The story was about
this young Indian elephant who paints pictures, and about how he was being
used to launch an environmental art competition for schoolchildren. We were
all trying to make the same picture of the elephant, three kids, some paint
and an easel. The composition was looking messy, and there were just too many
elements in it. We all had 17-35 lenses on and were getting nowhere. I was
getting nowhere faster than the other five who would all go to press that
night leaving me with two more days during which the story could easily get
scrapped without a strong image. My second camera had my 70-200 on it and
I grabbed it, zoomed in and the picture almost took itself. Strong, arresting,
different and wide open for headline writers to do their thing. Just about
every base covered. I shot some of a paint brush in the elephant's trunk too,
but this was the picture chosen.
When an image is competing for space on a newspaper page it has to stand out. The enlightened editors at our papers allow images to arouse the reader's interest and don't insist that photographs tell the whole story all of the time. This approach works on every level, from the family album through e-mailed postcards to published images. Getting in close works.
Space
Makes You Think
Composition #5: Space Makes You Think
In general I am a fan of tighter compositions, but there are some subject
mattters that are just crying out for space. An large area of foreground or
background can lend an enormous amount of emphasis to an image. Placing a
small subject in a large space helps you to tell a story. If you place a person
in one of the bottom corners you might suggest loneliness or vulnerability,
whereas placing them at the top may well imply the opposite.
This
photograph of a child breaking loose in the grounds of a stately home suggests
that he is really enjoying his freedom. The photograph was taken from quite
a height (maybe 25 feet) to isolate the grass from the confusing background
and the fact that he is nearer the right of the frame suggests that he has
a lot more room to head into. Normally having the subject heading out of frame
is a bad idea but it seems to work in this case.
If the space around the child in the photograph was full of details then the impact of the composition would be lost. You would inevitably give the image more than one subject and spoil the simplicity which is the real secret of the picture. Of course if the child's mother was in another area of the otherwise empty frame then that would give another message altogether, the space would still be making you think - but differently.
Cluttered photographs are much harder to pull off, simple images are often more effective and this image proves that simple doesn't necessarily mean tight.