Photography Composition: Quick Tips and Helpful Hints

Here are some things to keep in mind.

Shadows

Shadows are your worst enemy. They stretch the tonal range of your image usually beyond what your film can handle. For the most part, anything in a shadow will lose most if not all detail, unless you are willing to burn out highlights. Shadows can also make interesting subjects or can make an image stronger, however for the most part try to avoid them.

Pay close attention, shadows are everywhere! Taking photographs of things below trees is usually a bad idea for example because of the shadows that are cast, creating a very distracting image.

Here time of day makes a big difference. In the early morning and late afternoon hours, shadows are elongated and usually softer. At midday they are very strong. A good idea is to shoot your photographs with the shadows facing away from you. Shooting a subject where the shadows are directed toward you (the subject is often called backlit) is usually a bad idea.

Cloudy or foggy days are often good days for photography because the clouds act as natural diffusers, softening or even eliminating shadows.

Examining Picture-Taking Techniques

Picking a Place to Go

Finally, it's time to take your stuff out and start working on taking pictures! The first thing to do is to find an easily accessible place with a variety of subjects you can practice on. You could start with your house or neighborhood, maybe the park or somewhere in your hometown that's got a lot of interesting subjects. You want to pick a place you can go frequently and at any time. A big part of the learning process is critique and analysis, so practicing your techniques with a fixed set of subjects is a good idea.

When I first started photography, I chose to go to the beach. It was a bad idea because there wasn't much to take pictures of (at least I didn't think so at the time). My second choice was Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, since it was close to my house, I could go there anytime I wanted to and there are a lot of subjects to choose from.

Picking Subjects

The first time out you probably won't have any idea what to photograph. Birds, people, the scenery, the plants. The first time out, concentrate on still-life or landscape photography. You won't learn much if you're hoping around taking pictures of everything in sight.

The first thing to do is not to take out your camera and start shooting randomly. Don't just take pictures of things that catch your attention. What you want to do is spend some time scouting the area. Here things you should do:

• Look for interesting scenes or subjects.
• Observe the quality of light. Is it very bright and sunny or cloudy? How deep are the shadows?
• Note what time of day it is. Note what direction and how long shadows extend if there are any.
• Look in the sky and observe the clouds if there are any. You can use them as part of the scenery or they can be useful as natural light diffusers.
• Look at colors.

After you've spent some time scouting and have picked a few subjects, it's time to go out and try to take some pictures!

Basics of Composition

Less is More

Try to keep things simple. You do not necessarily have to get the whole scene or the whole subject in the frame. A picture can have too much which is a distraction.

The Rule of Thirds

The Rule of Thirds divides a scene into 9 sections. Using this guide, various elements are placed at or near the vertices formed by the intersection of the guidelines.

One of the biggest mistakes is to put the subject in the very center of an image. By putting the subject in the middle, you unintentionally create a symmetry within the image. The brain is used to symmetry so it does not really find it interesting.

The trick is to move your subjects off-center, by how much is subjective. There is a general guideline called the "Rule of Thirds" where one divides the frame into 9 individual sections in a 3x3 grid, much like a tick-tack-toe board. Each of the lines that divide the sections is a guideline which you should use a reference point. The most preferred points are where the guidelines cross (where the lines cross on a tick-tack-toe board).

Offsetting your subject does several things. First, it creates an asymmetry which will stimulate the brain. Second it influences the emphasis of the photograph. For example, suppose you take a photograph of a sunset over a beach. If you move the horizon line down to the bottom third, you have made it clear your emphasis is on the sky. If you did the opposite and moved it to the upper third, you make it clear that your interest is in the beach.

Now had you put the horizon directly in the center, the subject would become more unclear since there is no emphasis on either the beach nor the sky (they are equal in size). In addition the symmetry created makes the scene bland.

The Rule of Thirds is not a requirement to make good pictures, but it is a good starting point and a useful technique. You can offset photographs as much as you choose. There are other tools like the Golden Rule which divides the frame also into 3x3 sections but in a different manner. Even symmetrical images have their place--but only when the intention is to emphasize the symmetry itself.

Keep the Horizon Straight!

One of the most obvious but overlooked things is to keep the horizon and all things horizontal parallel with the image boundaries. Unless you are trying to do this intentionally, it is always a good idea to keep the horizon straight. In landscape photography this is usually a must.

Light

Indoor Lighting

You should always note the quality of light wherever you photograph. Indoors, lighting can vary greatly. You must be aware of the light temperature. Light emitted by fluorescent lighting appears greenish using daylight film. Tungsten or incandescent lighting has a yellowish or orange cast. People don't notice this because our brains automatically adjust so the color of lighting appears the same as daylight. If you want to compensate you must either use special film or attach color correction filters. Or you may simply like the color casts.

Indoor lighting tends to be dimmer than you think, requiring long exposure times. Often this means use of a tripod. When you can't use a tripod you must compensate with either faster film or faster lenses.

While indoors you must take note of the direction of lighting. Sometimes it may be multidirectional. Shadows don't have quite as major an impact as in outdoor photography, but you should observe them nonetheless.

Half Indoor/Half Outdoor Shots

If your image includes a clear window or an open door during the daytime, you can almost expect to either have the outdoor detail burned out, the indoor area blacked out or possibly a little bit of both.

The tonality range of such shots is far too great to be caught on film without the aid of very powerful flashes or photo lighting.

Outdoor Lighting

Outdoor lighting is much simpler than indoor lighting because usually the dominant source of light is the sun. The best kind of light to make photographs in terms of tonality are cloudy or foggy days. The cloud cover acts as a natural diffuser which softens or eliminates shadows.

Of course we don't always want to take pictures on cloudy and foggy days. Well then the best times otherwise would be the early morning or late afternoon hours. At those times, the light is often warmer and softer. Shadows are softer consequentially. They are also much more elongated, which can be useful for creating patterns or adding a sense of depth or size to your image. This is especially true in the short time right after sunrise or the just before sunset.

The worst time to take photographs is always midday on a cloudless, sunny day. The light is very strong, creating very harsh shadows. It's best to not take pictures in the middle of the day unless you have no other options.

Midday light on a cloudless day is the worst time to take pictures. The light is very strong. Shadows are harsh and abrupt and they give no sense of depth to the canyon unlike the photo on the left.	Early morning or late afternoon light is an ideal time for photography. Light is warmer and softer. Shadows are softer and longer, projecting a sense of depth and pattern.	Cloudy or foggy days are also good times to take pictures. Not only can it be used to set mood, but the diffuse daylight caused by the clouds holds the images tonality well within the limited range of film. Shadows are very soft and diffuse.

When just starting out it's a good idea to stick with easier lighting situations. Try to avoid all but the simplest indoor shots (those lit by natural daylight) and concentrated more on outdoor stuff. Try to go early in the morning or late in the afternoon. Look for stationery subjects. Work on composition and exposure.

Perspective

Perspective is a powerful tool for conveying subject prominence relationships. You can use it to give your landscape photos depth. You can also use it as a way to frame the relationship of one or more objects in your scene, or to the scene itself.

Perspective is controlled by two elements.

• Lens focal length
• Subject distance

The standard lens, the 50mm, has a perspective that approximates that of human sight. The smaller the focal length the more pronounced the exaggeration of perspective. At the very extreme are fisheye lenses which produce interesting 360 degree images. The greater the focal length, the more compressed perspective will be.

The distance you are away from a subject also affects perspective. It is more of an effect the closer you are to your subject.

Is the boulder really as large at the Three Sisters in the background? Of course not. What the boulder does do is establish a foreground subject of a large size as compared to the Three Sisters in the distance. This gives the image a sense of depth. Wide angle lenses allow you to exaggerate perspective. The size of the boulder allows it to share the same subjective importance as the Three Sisters in the background. As we look at the image, we are drawn to both the boulder and the Three Sisters.

Here perspective has been compressed with the use of a telephoto lens. The objective here was to de-emphasize depth. Here the emphasize is the shrubs' place in the scene.

Controlling perspective is a very useful too. With a zoom lens as your starter lens, you are able to experiment. Choose a subject and try to take pictures of it using various focal lengths. Try various distances and also various heights and angles. Take notice how much more or less exaggerated your subject is.

It's very easy to be seduced by wide angle shots. Try not to get into the habit of taking too many wide angle photos, try to spend some time working on telephoto shots too.

Landscape Photography

Some of the most satisfying photography you can do is landscape photography. It is easy to start with landscape photography, after all you simply go outside, look around and start taking pictures of interesting things you see. At the same time is it can also some of the most difficult and demanding type of photography. You are are at the complete mercy of Mother Nature and whatever She presents you have to deal with.

There are infinite possibilities when taking landscape photos. But people are often disappointed by their own photographs and wonder what could be done to make their images more dynamic.

The first thing to do is to find a way to create depth. This is done by looking at a scene and looking for three subjects:a foreground element, a middle area and a background element. This sounds harder than it really is.

The first thing to look for is an interesting foreground element. It can be anything around you that might look interesting in a photograph. Your foreground element does not have to be the dominant subject, though it can be if you choose. The object of the foreground element is to anchor your photograph so that your image appears to start from right in front of you.

The middle area is probably of lesser importance than either the foreground or background. It's a good idea to find a middle area that is not too cluttered. Patterns are good things to look for in the middle area. What you want to do is use the middle area to fill in the area from the foreground subject to the background subject.

The background element gives your image scale. The background is probably the easiest of elements since it's usually the surrounding landscape.

When combined together, your image has a sense of depth which stretches from your own perspective out to the background. Most people make the mistake of only taking the middle area and the background, or simply the background only. This is often the reason why people are disappointed by their landscape photos.

When taking landscape photos, the obviously the entire scene itself is the subject. You must maximize depth-of-field in landscape photography so it's best to stop down your lenses. Of course, the shorter your focal length, the less you need to stop down since depth-of-field increases with decreasing focal length. My own personal tendency is to stop down to at least f8, and most of the time to f16. You should always use a tripod, however when stopping down this much it's pretty much mandatory or you'll lose sharpness to camera shake.

Here are also some other helpful hints (some already mentioned in previous sections):

• Use the Rule of Thirds to control placement of your foreground subject and possibly your background elements.
• Offset your horizon line higher or lower depending on your emphasis. Move it higher if you want to emphasize the landscape, move it lower if you are want to emphasize the sky.
• Always keep your horizon parallel to your image boundaries.
• Try to avoid too much clutter, especially in the foreground. Simplicity lends itself to image effectiveness.
• A cloudless sky is boring. If there are clouds, try to include them, otherwise try to de-emphasize the sky.

Here are some example landscape photographs to examine:

Here the foreground is the floating log, the middle area is the valley floor and the background is El Capitan. The added perspective exaggeration from using a wide angle lens magnifies the feeling of depth and expanse. The scene itself the subject of the image, although the log, the water and the reflection in it and the mountains in the background all share similar prominence. There is a lot of "eye-candy" here, many elements of interest--making this image highly compelling.	The foreground element is the most prominent and the obvious subject. The middle area is dominated by the sea and the background is obviously the clouds. Again there is a sense of depth because the image is stretched out because of the three prominent elements. An added dynamic is the interplay of the sky and the penetrating light shining on the sea.
Here is an interesting photo in that there really is no middle area. The foreground subject is the panoramic dining area and the background is obviously the Canadian Rockies. But again the sense of depth is established here.	In this image the foreground is the trees and the rocks right in front (they are brightly light by natural breaks in the clouds illuminating the trees). The middle area (waterfall) is the prime subject of this image obviously and the background is the sky, the distance trees and the clouds. What this shows is that none of the three elements (especially the foreground subject) is necessarily the de facto subject of a landscape image following this technique. The point of the three elements again is to anchor different elements to illustrate depth, and that any one or all of the elements may be the primary subject of the image.

Landscape photographs do not always have to follow these guidelines. However they are a good starting point to understanding good landscape photography techniques.

There is much to learn about landscape photography, hopefully this will get you started down that path.

Subjective Photography

Subjective photography complements landscape photography in that it concentrates on particular object as the subject of an image. This is not necessarily portrait photography, which is a much more advanced type of photography will be covered separately.

Photographing subjects is not necessary more or less difficult than photographing landscapes. However it requires a different sort of discipline and vision.

First you must look for subjects to photograph. You aren't looking for people or a particular object necessarily. Sometimes you are looking for patterns or interactions between objects, colors, or shapes. In a way this is easier than doing a landscape photo because you can do this almost anywhere, but can be more challenging because you sometimes must think abstractly.

When doing subject photography, you usually concentrate on that subject alone or with some interaction within a specific scene. When the scene becomes very large sometimes the lines between landscape and subjective photography can be blurred. However for the most part when you are learning, you should concentrate on mainly on the subject and some interaction with the scene.

Here are some guidelines for taking subject photography:

• Use mid-telephoto and telephoto lenses. These are useful because they allow you to compress perspective and to shrink depth-of-field. You want shrink depth-of-field because normally you want to blur non-essential elements and center focus on your subject.
• Try to make your subject very prominent in your image. Subject size in an image emphasizes subject importance.
• Use the Rule of Thirds. Place your subject so that the direction he/she/it faces has 2/3rds the space of the image.
• A horizon is not necessary present in a subjective photo. Horizontal lines in your image however should usually be parallel to the image border. If your image intentionally skews horizontal lines, do so in a way that makes it clear that it is intentional.

Here are some examples of subjective photography:

In this image the subject obviously is the flowers. However this bundle of flowers sat in a sea of other bunches of the same type of flowers at the local orchard. Using a shallow depth of field (in this case thanks to a 50mm f1.4 lens) much of the other flowers, the stems and other distractions were simply blurred out.	This image is more about pattern and shape than it is about the kayaks themselves. These kayaks were in storage waiting to be rented at an adventure shop near Moss Landing (near Monterey, CA). The kayaks themselves were not very exciting but some of the pattern they were arrangements caught my eye.
Again another image where patterns and colors are the subject of the image. This was taken at the Haight Street Fair in San Francisco, CA. I wanted to express the feeling of the fair (and the Haight-Ashbury scene) by focusing on bright colors and lots of lines and non-symmetrical shapes.	Here is an image of subject interaction with the scene. This is a picture of my friend's mom. We were at my friend's son's 1st birthday party and I took this image. Here focus of the subject is my friend's mom and her expression as she looks at the child. The baby is intentionally slightly blurred to prevent him from becoming the focal point. Here the interaction is obvious between her and the baby.

Review

Composition

• Avoid symmetry unless you intentionally are trying to emphasize it.
• Use the Rule of Thirds as a guide.
• Keep the horizon parallel with the horizontal edges of your image.
• In a landscape shot, try to frame your shot with a foreground, middle area and a background.
• Use perspective to control presentation of depth, subject prominence.
• Try different angles, focal lengths, different shooting positions.
• Look not just for objects; look for patterns, shapes, lines, and colors that catch your attention.