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Photo Composition Basics - What You Need to Learn

By Autumn Lockwood

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 04Nov2010 Word count: 624 Viewed: 185 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

One of the most important things a photographer can carry in their bag is a firm understanding of the basic elements of photography. A picture is not just a piece of photo paper, but the result of thousands of tiny variables coming together all at once. Understanding these different elements and how you can use them to take better images is critical to your success as a photographer. One of the most critical elements of photography is composition.

What is Composition?

Composition is the way in which the subjects or objects of your picture interact with each other. You can think of it simply as where each object in a picture shows up in the frame and can also include things such as depth of field, focus and zoom. When a picture has great composition it tells a clear story but when the composition is bad, the picture becomes less appealing. If you've ever seen a photograph that seemed "good" but boring, it is likely that bad composition was the cause.

The Components of Composition

There are a few helpful rules of composition that, once learned, can have an amazing positive effect on the nature of your photographs. While these rules are by no means concrete and in photography breaking rules is often more fun than following them, they should serve to give you a baseline for understanding composition's impact on your shoots.

Rule of Thirds

The Rule of Thirds is based on the artistic assumption that humans are naturally inclined to look at the point of an image that falls about two-thirds up from the bottom. If you imagine a photograph cut into nine equal squares, your subject should fall as close to one of their intersections as possible. Whenever you take pictures, picture the lines in your image and try to line them up for an even better result.

Balancing Your Image

While this isn't an official "rule," it is still a helpful thing to keep in mind when shooting. Position your subjects off center and use the rule of thirds but be careful of having too much space around the subject. Whenever possible, try to balance important parts of an image with less important parts - for example, a photograph of a child running through grass would be more interesting if they were near one side of the frame, and where they were running was at the other.

Lines

Our eyes are naturally drawn to lines. Our minds are naturally drawn to following patterns and lines so you can use this to your photographic advantage. When lining up a shot, look for lines in the frame and ask yourself if they lead to important parts of your image. If they don't, it is likely the viewer will be unsatisfied with the image as their eyes trace the lines to find out they aren't supposed to be traced.

The Power of Cropping

Sometimes what you leave out of your picture can be as important as what you leave in. You should be cropping in your mind every time you line the camera up for a shot - get rid of the extra stuff that distracts from the subject, and fill the frame with what you want to capture. There are methods for fixing this in the darkroom or with software, but it is far better to develop a habit of cropping in-frame.

Composition is one of the parts of photography that really takes years to master. Because it represents the culmination of several other elements, composition is something that will present a constant challenge even to the most experienced photographer. Once you have mastered the basic rules and know how they work, then it becomes time to break them.

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