Composition Explained: Techniques for Photography Beginners
Composition is critical. If you want to take powerful photos, it’s one of the most important parts of photography. Still, a lot of photographers will start hearing about the rule of thirds, and they never go more in-depth on how to compose better photos. The good news is that you can learn more about composition – and you should. It’s a deep topic, and there’s no way to cover everything in just one article, but I’ll do my best to hit the biggest points below, in this chapter of my Photography Basics guide.
What is Composition?
Composition is the structure of a photograph. It’s how you arrange the elements in your image to create the look you want, and it can make or break an image. If you stumble upon an interesting subject — no matter how good the light is, or how unusual the conditions are — you still need to compose the photo well if you want a successful result. You have an absurd amount of power to change the composition of a photo. Move forwards and backwards, left and right. Change your lens — zoom in, zoom out. And pay attention to which elements of the scene you’re including, as well as the ones you’re not. Done right, composition takes your subject and presents it to your viewers as effectively as possible. It is the mechanism for conveying a message with your photos.
The Elements of Composition
At the most fundamental level, those are the elements of composition. Anything in your image – your subject, the background, tiny details that don’t even matter – are all points, lines, and shapes. Some of them are very complex, of course. A face or a tree clearly are not simple things. But they still have a shape, and they can help form the structure of an image. On top of individual elements in a photo, there’s also the way they interconnect with one another. Several elements of a photo, arranged properly, are stronger than the sum of their parts.
Intent
The big secret of composition is not that you should follow one structure or template for a majority of your photos (which is what the rule of thirds suggests). Instead, the important thing is to pick your composition intentionally. Intent is the most important part of composition. Nothing in the photograph should happen by accident. Everything must have a reason to exist. If you remember that, and you really spend time in the field making it happen, your photos will skyrocket in quality. It’s almost impossible to avoid since you’ll end up putting more conscious thought into how a photo appears.
Simplicity
Every photo you take has an emotional message — the core reason why you chose to take a photo in the first place. When you’re out taking pictures, one of the best things you can do is consciously think about the emotional message, and hone in on how you want to express it. That’s where the power of simplicity comes in. Simplicity means that nothing in your photo takes away from the emotional message. If you’re trying to convey a sense of beauty at a landscape, eliminate everything from the photo that isn’t beautiful. That could be power lines, footprints in the foreground, a piece of trash in the frame, and so on. At the same time, simplicity also refers to your composition. Don’t overwhelm your viewers with too much information, unless your goal actually is to capture an overwhelming, chaotic photo. When your photo tells the story you want without any distractions, it will be as powerful as possible.
Balance
One of the main things I think about when composing a picture is balance. Balance is fairly easy. To start, all you need to do is ask yourself how much attention each element in the image attracts. This is known as “visual weight.” Objects that have high levels of visual weight include bright objects, saturated colors, eyes, people, animals, high contrast, and unusual elements — anything that attracts attention in the real world. Then, figure out if the visual weight is distributed evenly across the frame, or if one half of the photo has more than the other (from left to right). If they’re roughly even, it’s a balanced photo. If not, the photo is imbalanced. This works a lot like a seesaw, including the fact that you can balance a “heavy” object — your main subject — with a “lighter” object, so long as the lighter object is farther to the edge of the photograph. If you’re photographing a gentle lake at sunrise, you might not want an imbalanced photo. But, with more intense subjects, it could be the perfect composition. It just depends upon the mood you’re trying to convey.
Breathing Space
When there are multiple points of interest in a photo, you may want to give them “breathing space” by spacing them apart from one another. Otherwise, elements of your photo will interfere with one another (or the edges of your frame), making for a sloppy composition. Think about a scene where a few birds are flying through the air, and you want to capture all of them in a single photo. If one bird crosses in front of another, though, that area of the image will look messy and unintentional. It’s better, instead, if all your subjects have some space to breathe — between one another, and between the edges of your image. The same goes if you’re photographing a mountain, and the peak is almost touching the very top of your photograph. In that case, it will draw unwanted attention and potentially demonstrate a sense of carelessness. Instead, it tends to work better if your subjects each have room to stand on their own, unobstructed by anything else in the photo. That helps you send a strong, cohesive message to your viewers.
Patterns and Relationships
In some cases, with care, you can capture photos that have more intricate patterns and relationships than just a simple composition. For example, you might photograph a landscape with an orange flower in the foreground, and orange light on distant hills. Or, you could capture a plume of smoke rising from a volcano at night, and matching with the shape of the Milky Way overhead. There’s no end to the world of deeper relationships that are possible in photography. It’s not something you’ll find all the time, but you should keep an eye out. When a photo has an especially imaginative relationship, it will feel completely interconnected and intentional.