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How To Improve Composition In Photography
Composition is another term for a photographer’s skill in organising a subject into a well balanced and pleasing position in the camera viewfinder.
For immovable or out-of-reach subjects, composition is influenced by your shooting position, as well as your choice of wide-angle or telephoto lens.
For nearby subjects like people, composition can be determined by direction and people-organisation skills. Most amateur photographers place their subjects centrally in the frame and don't take advantage of dynamic compositional effects. The best photographers have a sense of adventure and are willing to experiment.
Balance and Weight
The more you shoot the more experienced you get over time, and an intuitive understanding of visual balance usually follows. When you organise scenes in the viewfinder, each element in your composition will vie for visual attention. Over-cluttered compositions have too much emphasis in too many areas of the image, and lack emphasis and a clear message.
Strong colours and heavy textures will dominate and swamp your main subject, as can patterned backgrounds. If you can't move these objects out of your frame, a good way to minimise their destructive effect is to blur them out using a wide-aperture value.
Visual weight can be described as the effect of a colour or tone pulling a viewer's eye in a particular direction and, if used effectively, can act as a counterbalance to the central subject. The best way to get into this kind of thinking and picture taking is to look at books of great photographs and see how others have used these rules to improve composition. No photographer was born with innate compositional design skills, most were borrowed along the way. In other words, you need to work hard if you want to improve your composition.
Symmetry
The easiest kind of balanced composition to make is a symmetrical one. Symmetrical photographs are those which have near-identical elements on either side of an imaginary vertical or horizontal fold and are, as a consequence, very eye-catching. As a starting point, place the main elements of your composition in the centre of the frame until balance is achieved along the vertical or horizontal axis. Architectural and landscape subjects work well with this kind of approach, but you may need to pull in additional items in the frame to balance things out. These kind of images don't need to be mathematically equal and can look very artificial if done so.
Asymmetry
Perhaps harder to define, because of the rule-breaking nature of the concept, is an asymmetrical composition. Asymmetrical compositions are visually attractive - due to the very fact that they are imbalanced and totally removed from everyday life experience. Most of these sorts of pictures are produced as happy accidents rather than carefully stage-managed shots, and the best will often have a certain element of humour about them.
The Rule of Thirds
An excellent set of guidelines to base your landscape photography on is the rule of thirds. This theory suggests that an image should be divided up into a grid of nine equal but entirely invisible sections and was adopted by many artists and painters in western art movements. The idea of the rule of thirds theory suggests that as long as elements are placed on these grid lines (or at their intersections), a pleasing compositional can be achieved. Next time you're out shooting in the open landscape, why not try some variations on this theme?
Vista Views
Composition is far from the mundane task of fitting together objects into a kind of two-dimensional jigsaw pattern. Great use can be made of diminishing distance and depth within the photographic frame. The limitations of natural light and your own viewpoint rarely enable you to cram more than a few miles of distance into a single shot at the best of times.
Open space sweeping countryside can be captured to good effect with a vista view. Vistas are made when a set of parallel lines merge into each other at the vanishing point on the horizon and, in addition to making a great graphic effect, lead your eye from the foreground of the photograph to the background. As so many photographic images are viewed and dismissed within a fraction of a second, anything that makes the viewer dwell for a little bit longer can only be a good thing.
Software Composition
Digital images can be cropped and recomposed in a digital imaging application like Photoshop. The best tool to use is the Cropping tool which, on the latest versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, darkens down the areas you propose to crop off, so that you can contemplate the consequences of your actions. Digital recomposition inevitably means the loss of some areas of original pixels, which reduces the potential to print at a larger size.
More useful, perhaps, is the ability to remove unwanted elements by using the Stamp tool, by painting out distracting parts of the image that went unnoticed at the time of capture. (The introduction of these and many other rescue processes should not encourage the photographer to be lazier and less concerned with finding perfection!)
Framing in the Viewfinder
Great photographs are made at the moment the shutter release is pressed, but the critical judgements are made beforehand in the viewfinder. The viewfinder is the preview window in a camera that frames your composition.
In addition to the image, most digital cameras provide information in the display, such as focus and exposure confirmation. Large viewfinders are easier to use, especially if you wear spectacles and find it hard to see through a tiny window.
With a digital camera's rear-mounted LCD preview screen, photographers can, for the first time, contemplate a two-dimensional scene before pressing the shutter, and visualise exactly how the final print will be balanced.
With all the advantages of real-time framing, holding the camera steady at arm's length is far from easy. With a tendency to wobble and tilt, only tripod-mounted cameras will be certain of shooting an accurate and predetermined composition.
Most amateur photographs - especially those shot on unsophisticated and older film-based compact cameras -never get close enough to the subject. If you are worried about chopping off the heads and feet of your portraits, then you are probably standing too far away A tall and thin person doesn't easily fit into the shape of your viewfinder, so you will have to zoom in closer or move your own position to crop out any unnecessary details.
Getting closer to your subject has an additional advantage, too, because detailed backgrounds become more blurred and are a lot less distracting to the eye.
Parallax Error
In older viewfinder film cameras, the optics were not as sophisticated as they are today and there was always the risk of cropping people's heads off by mistake. Without any way of previewing the final image, the only alternative was to stand well back and hope for the best. With all viewfinder compacts, including digitals, the viewing window is set to the left of the camera lens and sees a slightly different image -especially at close range.
As a result, unexpected crops can occur when close focusing. This is called parallax error and is responsible for many disappointing family snapshots. SLR cameras use a clever arrangement of mirrors called a pentaprism to let the photographer focus and compose directly through the lens and don't suffer from the same problem. More expensive digital compacts offer a direct LCD preview directly through the lens, that also prevents parallax problems from surfacing. Next time you flick through the family album, be less critical of your photographic predecessors, as many errors were down to bad camera design.
Another useful advice on how to improve composition would be to always avoid framing your subjects too closely to the edge and always leave a slight gap where possible. The hardest skill for an emerging photographer to learn is to keep a close eye on distracting backgrounds.
Caught up in the excitement of composing and arranging the central subject, background details are easily overlooked. Common mistakes are telegraph poles sticking out of heads, or signs with inappropriate wording appearing inexplicably in your frame. Small details can be painstakingly removed later in your imaging application, but it only takes a second to recompose another shot, or choose a wider aperture to blur out the background.
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