Tom Clark - Digital Photography Composition For Dummies

example, you're photographing a doctor who developed a robot that can perform surgery, you may want to choose a format that provides enough space to include her and her creation. The robot would be equally important to telling the story as the doctor.

The square format was made popular in the days of film, when photographers used to shoot with medium-format cameras. Today, digital cameras produce large files, so you can easily crop into an image to create the square format with any camera. When doing so, remember to compose your scenes accordingly. Focus on what's in the center of your frame, keeping in mind that you'll crop out anything outside the square.

The basic rules of composition (see Chapter 5) apply in the same ways to the square format as to the rectangle. You can break the square into thirds to locate areas of compositional strength, frame a subject, and lead viewers into the image and around it using leading lines

and shapes. Photographers often use a square image to bring a sense of harmony between the subject and its environment. The square offers benefits from both the vertical and horizontal formats without going in either direction all the way.

In this figure, I chose the square format in order to fit the length of my subject's body in the frame without losing details in the foreground and background. A horizontal format would have either included unnecessary space on the edges of my frame or cropped into the foreground and background. A vertical format would have been difficult to fit my horizontal subject into without adding too much foreground and background.

50mm, 1/160 sec, f/6.3, 50

If the elements of interest in an environment are spread out in a horizontal or vertical manner, you can easily determine the best format for composing the image — regardless of what your subject is. If you compose an image vertically and notice that a bunch of empty, unnecessary space exists at the top of your frame, you may be able to use a horizontal format instead.

Figure 11-9 gives an example of an image in which the environment, not the subject, dictates the format of the frame. The full moon acts as the subject in this image. The moon is fairly small in the frame and is neither a vertical nor a horizontal subject, so I could have used a horizontal or vertical format. Instead, the skyscrapers and the lights on the metro rail determined how I formatted this composition.

The horizontal format of Figure 11-9 enabled me to show more of the buildings and to fit the lit area of the metro rail into my frame. I could have achieved great results by shooting this scene vertically, but the subject wouldn't be affected by the change as much as the environment would be.

50mm, 1/30 sec, VI.2, 200

Figure 11-9:The environment, notthe subject, determined the format of this image.

In This Chapter

Achieving balance in your compositions

Driving home your message through repetition

Avoiding traditional compositions with creative techniques

Thecomposition of a photo is part of what makes it unique. However, you won't apply all the compositional rules all the time (in fact, doing so isn't possible), and what works for one scenario may not work for another.

Think of compositional rules and techniques as tools, and be sure you know which tool is right for each job. Your intended message of a particular scene determines which techniques work best. Sometimes you photograph a scene that presents its elements in a nice, clear way, and you don't have to think very hard about how to compose the frame. Other times you have to examine a scene more deeply to reveal what's special about it. If at first glance nothing jumps out at you as the subject or as having much meaning, use the techniques discussed in this chapter to draw something out of it.

Television keeps a viewer's attention by providing a continuously changing image. You're always seeing something new (apart from the fact that much of the content on television is reruns), so you likely spend more time looking

at a single screen than you do a single photograph. Similarly, most people flip through magazines quickly, giving the average photo just a few seconds of their time. A photograph is only one image, so people feel they can get the message right away and move on.

Your job as a photographer is to catch the attention of viewers before they have a chance to flip the page or move on to another image. Creating compositions in which the elements are balanced throughout the frame and the message is informative is a great way of doing so. Viewers can't help but notice harmony within the frame of an image. When the elements in a photograph are balanced, they show viewers how to see the image and hold their eyes within the frame. Plus, having a sense of scale provides viewers with information that's necessary to understanding the size and distance relationships of elements within the frame.

In this section, I discuss the compositional weight of elements and how you can affect that weight. I also describe how to include a sense of scale in your compositions and the benefits of doing so.

When arranging the furniture in a room, would you ever choose to place everything on just one side? Sure, you may do it to create a dance floor for a party, but for everyday living, you probably arrange the furniture in a way that gives it balance.

Balance isn't absolutely necessary, but it's natural and can work wonders for your photographic composition. An unbalanced composition in a photograph may give your viewers an uneasy feeling when they look at it — a good thing only when you do it intentionally. Generally, you want people to enjoy looking at your images, and you have many options for achieving this mission through balance. Each element has a certain visual impact in your frame known as its weight. How you distribute the elements based on their varying weights determines the balance of your composition.

In photographic composition, weight refers to the amount of impact an element has in comparison to the other elements in the scene. A larger element has more weight than a smaller element; an area with more contrast has more weight than an area with less contrast; and a more colorful element has more weight than a duller element.

Making compositional elements mimic one another With symmetry

When you use symmetry in a composition, you aim for an even distribution of weight, which may mean size, shape, tone, color, and so on. With symmetry, for every element you place on one side of the frame, place something of similar weight directly across on the opposite side.

By creating balance with symmetry, you give viewers a subconscious desire to move their eyes back and forth through the frame. A composition divided up into equally weighted sections gives viewers more to look at than a composition that only has one point of interest.

You don't have to achieve perfect symmetry to have balance. Your goal is simply to create a composition in which your points of interest aren't all crammed into one area, but are spread evenly throughout the frame.

In Figure 12-1,1 positioned the vanishing point (the area at which the pier disappears into the distance) of the pier in the center and a large piling on the right side of the frame. The piling carries a lot of weight, so I balanced it out in order to make the left side of the frame equal in visual impact. Placing my subject opposite the piling helped to achieve a type of symmetrical balance in this composition.