Composition

Composition is the pleasant arrangement of elements within a frame.

Edward Weston said it best: "Composition is the strongest way of seeing." You need to organize your stuff so it makes sense to every disconnected viewer, otherwise your photos will stink.

Framing is how you drop the photo's edges onto your composition. It's controlled by where you point your camera and your lens' focal length.

Perspective is the location of your camera. Perspective is defined by where you stand and at what height you hold your camera. Perspective doesn't change as you zoom. Perspective only changes as you walk around and raise and lower your camera. Tripod users cripple themselves because all too often they shoot every picture at the same height, which is rarely the best height.

Composition is when your girlfriend comes over and straightens up all your magazines, cameras, half disassembled motorcycle engines, shoes, books, dirty socks and sporting goods that you left all over the house.

All this junk makes perfect sense to you or me, but it makes no sense to the woman or anyone else who comes over. You or I know exactly why and where everything is, but it makes no sense to anyone else. The woman needs to organize it so she can understand it and so it looks pretty to her.

This is composition, and most men hate it. I know I sure do. That's why our photos usually suck.

Like a dirty room, your photos always make sense to you, but they won't make sense to anyone else unless you clean them up first.

A photo needs to make sense instantly to anyone who looks at it. No one is going to try to figure out your photo any more than anyone would try to figure out why you've got dirty shirts thrown in three random piles. No one cares about your piles, and no one will care about your photos unless you expend conscious effort to tidy them up.

All too many hobbyists worry about every technical and equipment issue, but never bother organizing what's in their photos as the snap them.

Camera catalogs, just like furniture stores, like to lull you into thinking that all you have to do is buy the camera (or furniture), and everything will magically clean itself up for you.

Most people set up in the most convenient spot and shoot away. We'll zoom in and out and look left and right, but that's it. We figure we always can fine-tune things later in Photoshop or Lightroom. Just like our living rooms, we know we can clean them up later.

NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You can clean up your bedroom next week, but you can't fix composition after the shutter closes. Photoshop can make things lighter or darker or crop out junk on the sides, but it's a real bear to try to move objects around within a frame. You can move objects if you extract them and put them into separate layers, but you never can move shadows or light sources unless you start redrawing pixel-by-pixel.

Guess what? I've worked in Hollywood where we do these things to images in post production every day, but the only way we can move light sources is by reshooting, or by re-rendering CG (computer-generated elements) after we've updated the coefficients that describe the light sources.

The only way to ensure strong composition is to look through your finder and make it that way before you press the shutter.

Move yourself around to change perspective, which moves elements around in your frame. You can change the relative sizes of elements by moving in and zooming out to maintain the same framing. When you do, closer elements just got bigger while distant ones just got smaller. This is the real reason to use zooms: because you have precise control over the relative sizes of objects so you can create perfect balance.

Move the objects around yourself if you can. Have your model move here or there, push the props around, and have people do what you need them to, because it's usually impossible to change it later.

Composition is just like arranging stuff in your house. Some people have a knack for it, like women, while we men usually just make it practical. Some people have a natural talent to make things look right, while most people don't. I know I sure don't; before I was married, my place was a dump.

I have to work really hard to make my photos work. It has everything to do with conscious composition, and nothing to do with dumb luck.

Photographic composition is just like interior design. Each places elements in a space: the designer arranges your room, while you have to design the elements in your frame.

Does this require practice and careful study? Yes! Some people just have the knack, while most people don't.

Painters need to dream all this up in their heads. Painting is tough.

Photographers have it easy: we can move around and hopefully recognize when things look right in our finders.

If you shoot by pointing your camera and zooming in and out, that's why your photos are dull, regardless of how expensive your camera gear. Your photos are probably as messy as was your dorm room.

Just like the stuff in your house, a photo only looks good to other people when you've gone through the conscious process of arranging (composing) everything to make the clearest, strongest statement that you can.

Your photo can't be like a messy room. A good photo has everything arranged perfectly so that when someone sees it for the first time, everything is obvious and there are no distracting elements.

I hate it when strangers send me crappy, carelessly composed photos and ask me "are these any good?" The key word is careless: the shooter never paid any attention before he shot. No one cares if they're sharp and well exposed (every camera does that automatically today), what's important is what effort did you put into composing the picture.

I always find something nice to say because that's the way I am, even though I'm usually thinking "What a careless idiot. Why would he think anyone else cares about this photo if he didn't care about it when he snapped it in the first place? What is this photo supposed to mean? What am I, a mind reader?"

For the particularly dense, when I say I'm not a mind reader, I mean that of course I know you've sent me a snapshot of a cat or a kid or a sunset. So? Why should I care? When I say "what does it mean," I mean does it show glee? Elation? Does it make me laugh? Does it make me soil my own pants over how beautiful it is?

What makes the photo stand out or make it beautiful? Is there a funny gesture? Does the cat have a $500 bill in its mouth? Are you showing me a unique point of view I haven't seen before? Is there a punchline (funny ending) someplace?

Ask yourself: what about the photo makes it worthwhile for anyone else to spend the time examining? If there isn't anything, then it's just another crappy snapshot. Digital will do this to people; that's why there's a delete button. Use it.

Good photos reward viewers. Crappy photos without rewards waste people's time.

If you shoot and don't really know why, your photos probably fall into this class. As Galen Rowell observed, careless shooters will usually come up with an OK shot every so often by pure luck, but the only way to create consistently good work is to pay attention.

Pay attention to what? That's why you go to art school, and why most of the world's best photographers have arts degrees, like Cartier-Bresson, Jay Maisel, Ansel Adams, and the list goes on and on. The best class you can take to improve your photography is to take a local adult-ed or community college class in drawing, painting or composition. It's often free, or might cost as much as a whopping $80.

In a nutshell, composition is all about balance. It's all about balance between light and dark, warm and cool, big and small, rhythm, pattern, line, curves, impact, negative space, texture and a lot more.

Composition also deals with how a viewer's eye enters and explores the image. Our eyes are first attracted to the lightest or most contrasty areas, and explore out from there. Don't give the eye any lines that lead it out of the image; you never want to break the frame. Darken the edge of the frame if a line might lead an eye out, but remember that lines also can lead eyes in. We Americans read from left to right; other cultures read differently. You want to keep viewer's eyes from wandering out of the picture. Darkening the edges and lightening your intended points of interest help.

Pay rapt attention to your composition while shooting. Forget tech while you're shooting. I may obsess about tech all day while writing this website, but when I shoot, I think about nothing technical at all.

The only reason to pay any attention to technical issues is so that you've so mastered them that they are unconscious second nature when you're out shooting.

All I'm doing when shooting is concentrating on how things layout and balance in my finder. I'm even trying to defocus my eyes so I see the critical underlying fundamentals of the image, without the distracting details.

Good composition happens in the subconscious basics that underlie an image. The strong fundamentals of light, dark and color that we see even as a thumbnail image are the most critical things.

Sharpness has little to no bearing on composition, and therefore has little to do with the value of an image. Sharpness is a distraction that diverts our attention away from the fundamental elements which are the foundation of a strong image.

I'll say that again: the most important parts of every image are the things that are visible even as a tiny thumbnail. These are the overall organization, weight and balance of every image. If you can't get an image to look good as a thumbnail, it's not a strong image.

Concentrate on the thumbnail as you compose. Tiny finders aren't much fun, but they help us see the basics better. Big finders are bad because they make it more difficult to see the basics: we see the leaves on the trees instead of the overall composition of an image.

Large format cameras have upside-down images, which are great because they further abstract the image from the present reality, and force the photographer to create a composition with strong basics that stand up regardless of the details.

Ask any painter: often they'll invert their canvas to see if the composition holds up when the conscious subject matter goes away.

Focus on the fundamentals of your composition, not the details of your subject or technology. Be certain that every image makes sense to anyone who sees it, not just to you.

Composition is everything in a photo. The basics of color and shape are critical. The actual subject matter is only secondary or tertiary. Art critics tend to categorize me as a toilet photographer, but in fact, my work is all about the colors, shapes and relationships. Toilets just happen to pop into my viewfinder becaue I usually have to pee after being out shooting, but they aren't the subject: it's their shapes and colors.

Source : http://kenrockwell.com