Photo composition, skills to structure your pictures
Photo composition, skills to structure your pictures | ||
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The way you visually compose your pictures is as important as their technical quality. But this skill is acquired with experience as much as learnt. Composition is to do with showing things in the strongest, most effective way, whatever your subject. Often this means avoiding clutter and confusion between the various elements present unless this very confusion contributes to the mood you want to create. It involves you in the use of lines, shapes and areas of tone within your picture, irrespective of what the items actually are, so that they relate together effectively, with a satisfying kind of geometry. Composition is therefore something photography has in common with drawing, painting and the fine arts generally. The main difference is that you have to get most of it right while the subject is still in front of you, making the best use of what is present at the time. The camera works fast. Even digital methods do not offer as many opportunities to gradually build up your final image afterwards as does a pencil or brush. 'Rules' of composition have gone out of fashion, with good reason. They encourage results which slavishly follow the rules but offer nothing else besides. As Edward Weston once wrote: 'Consulting rules of composition before shooting is like consulting laws of gravity before going for a walk.' Of course it is easy to say this when you already have an experienced eye for picture making, but guides are helpful if you are just beginning. Practise making critical comparisons between pictures that structurally 'work' and those that do not. Discuss these aspects with other people, both photographers and non-photographers. Where a subject permits, it is always good advice to shoot several photographs – perhaps the obvious versions first, then others with small changes in the way items are just a positioned, etc., increasingly simplifying and strengthening what your image expresses or shows. It's your eye that counts here more than the camera (although some cameras get far less in the way between you and the subject than others). Composition can contribute greatly to the style and originality of your pictures. Some photographers, Lee Friedlander, for example, go for off beat constructions which add to the weirdness of picture contents. Others, like Arnold Newman and Henri Cartier- Bresson, are known for their more formal approach to picture composition. Composition in photography is almost as varied as composition in music or words – melodic or atonal, safe or daring – and can enhance subject, theme, and style. Every photograph you take involves you in some compositional decision, even if this is simply where to set up the camera or when to press the button. | ||