Awareness of Composition

Composition is how you put the elements of your photograph together. The elements are your primary subject, other "things" in the scene, and the frame of the photograph itself.

Composition is hard to teach, because it's hard to articulate the rules. In fact, there are few (if any) true "rules". I prefer to think of them as guidelines, suggestions, and things to try. Despite this inherent difficulty, I think a lot of us have an innate sense of composition. We are bombarded with thousands of images on TV, in magazines, and on the web. We can separate the good ones from the bad ones pretty easily, even if we can't say why.

We need to start with that innate sense and try to discover how to make photographs that appeal to it. That's a difficult step from just being able to recognize it.

Here are some exercises to increase your awareness of composition.

Exercise: Open to a magazine ad and study a picture that grabs your eye. The photographer made hundreds of decisions to get that shot: selection of subject, including or excluding other details, color, lighting, framing, position of the subject in relation to the other elements, focus and depth-of-field. Try to identify some key decisions in the image. Ask yourself what the other options were. Try to imagine what the image would look like if you had made a different decision. Would it be better or worse that way? Can you come up with something you would have done to improve the image?

Exercise: Buy a roll of film (it's cheap, get 36 exposures, not 24). Go into your back yard, pick a subject, and shoot the entire roll. Every shot is an experiment. Vary every decision you can think of until the roll is exhausted. Go to an overnight or one-hour processor, so you can see the results before you forget the ideas that were in your head at the time. Study the pictures. Rank them. What worked? What didn't? When you shoot lots of different subjects over time, it's very hard to imagine what you could have done differently. By limiting yourself to one subject and getting quick results, you can learn faster.