Tom Clark - Digital Photography Composition For Dummies

Asking these questions helps you put yourself in situations that work to your advantage based on the photo you want or need to take. If you're shooting street photography or travel photography, you have to work with what you're given as far as subject matter and backgrounds. Using this type of photography is a great way to develop your skills in composition because you're forced to think fast and pay attention to details. Working with in-studio shoots, on the other hand, allows you to manipulate the scenes more.

In this section, you discover some of the pros and cons associated with shooting in open spaces and in tight spaces as well as how to work within each. You also find out what solid backgrounds do for your message and how to achieve different effects when using them.

If you choose to photograph on location, I recommend shooting at times during the day when the light is directional and creates interesting effects on your backgrounds and subjects. For instance, it's a good practice to shoot early in the morning and late in the afternoon. See Chapter 10 for more on ideal outdoor lighting conditions.

Having space to work with is essential to compositional freedom. You may not take advantage of the entire scene by including it in your frame, but you have the option to. When you're surrounded by expansive space, the background is probably going to be far from your subject, which gives you flexibility when it comes to lens choice. You can use different focal lengths to create entirely different representations of the same scene. Consider the following, for example:

" A wide-angle lens will show how expansive the space is in relation to your subject and will reveal more details in the background.Shooting with a wide-angle lens in a wide-open space means that you can move around without changing your background too drastically. You can get as close or as far from your subject as you see fit. You control your depth of field partially by getting closer or farther from the subject.

In the left-hand image of Figure 9–1,1 kept my distance from the subject in order to show the scene that she was photographing. In this image, you see that she is photographing. You also see what she is photographing. In the right-hand image, I got very close to the subject to make it all about her hands and the 4-x-5-view camera she's operating. In this shot, you can still see mountains in the background, but the depth of field has changed and the subject takes up the majority of the frame, lessening the importance of the background. You can't see what the subject is photographing; you can only tell that she's using the camera.

A telephoto lens will show a more intimate relationship between the subject and the background by decreasing the amount of background in the frame.If Iwould have moved in on my subject in the images in Figure 9–1 by using a telephoto lens rather than physically getting closer to her, I would have lost a great portion of the mountains that were in the background. This would have made the composition even more about the hands and the camera's parts and less about the relationship of the photographer and the environment.

Photographing in a tight space is much more limiting than working in open spaces (see the preceding section). Because the amount of space you can set between yourself, the subject, and the background is sparse, you have to rely on aperture for depth of field. (Chapters 3 and 7 provide more information on aperture and depth of field.) Depending on the size of your subject, your telephoto lens may be useless in a tight space.

I typically shoot with a 50mm lens when I have little room to work with. I feel that this lens shows things as closely as possible to the way the human eye sees them in reality, which provides a certain integrity to the photograph. Using an extremely wide-angle lens in a tight space helps you show as much of the scene as possible; however, the closer the elements in a scene are to your wide lens, the more barrel distortion you have in the image. (Barrel distortion refers to an object looking larger in the middle than at its edges; I discuss this type of distortion in detail in Chapter 8.)

A tight space keeps you up-close and personal with the background and forces you to examine the strong points and weaknesses in it. (In a wide-open space, your background could be so far that you don't see intimate details in it; you simply see more of it.) So, pay attention to shapes, textures, colors, and light. These elements add interest to your composition. If, for example, your background is a wall with peeling paint, use the area of the wall that has the most interesting shapes, colors, and textures as a result of the corrosion.

24mm, 1/80 sec, f/5, 50

24mm, 1/80 sec, f/5.6, 50

Figure 9–1:In wide-open spaces, you have more control of your distance to the subject than to the background.

Find a way to fit your subject into the scene comfortably, keeping in mind what I mention about intersecting and merging lines in the later section "Backgrounds that merge with your subject." The subject's shape should interact positively with the background so the tight space makes sense. Otherwise, you may end up with a composition that feels awkward or unnatural.

I was in a tight squeeze when I shot Figure 9–2, so I placed the model right up against the background and shot with my normal 50mm lens. The result was a tight crop, which works well for images used on a model comp card (a marketing tool for models to show off their features and posing abilities). Positioning the model so close to the background was beneficial because the wall's texture was interesting and worth having in focus.

Solid backgrounds enable you to surround your subject with negative space, which is ideal when you want to make sure your viewers concentrate on the subject and nothing else. Eliminating competing elements in the scene ensures that the subject remains the sole reason for the photograph to exist.

When you use solid backgrounds, you have fewer elements to get your message across; so every compositional decision you make will have a strong impact on your message. So you have to be creative when using solid backgrounds and make decisions based on your desired message. Here are some background elements to pay attention to:

50mm, 1/125 sec, f/3.2, 50

Figure 9–2:Tight spaces often call for tight crops that reveal as much detail as possible.

Detail:Because the background provides few details, each detail has a great impact on the story. If, for example, you provide an image with no details in the background, viewers won't focus attention on that background. However, if you include a shadow on the background, you've introduced a detail that tells viewers that a background exists.

Texture:When shooting against a solid background, you typically want to eliminate all texture in order to keep the viewer's focus on your subject. If you don't have a smooth background available, you can have your subject step away from the background as much as possible. Because of depth of field, the farther the subject is from the background, the less detail the background shows in the photograph. (I explain depth of field in detail in Chapter 7.) In the case that you include the texture of the background, viewers will naturally consider what type of background they're looking at.

Color:If the background is one solid color, the color will most likely be the strongest supporting element in the photograph. You can choose the color of your background based on what mood you want to create or on how well it complements the subject. Refer to Chapter 6 for details regarding complementary colors and how they affect a person's view of an image.