3 Tips For Beginners About Photography Composition

One of the most asked question that people starting out in photography ask me, is: ‘how can I make my image better’? And most of the times it all starts with Photography composition.

This is by far one of the harder aspects of photography for beginners to understand, since it doesn’t rely on anything technical you can look up. Some know that there are some ‘rules’ around compositions but have a hard time putting them into practice (more with specific photography like macro, where bugs move quickly). And yet, it doesn’t all has to do with knowing the rules, but with training your eye and let the creative side of your brain kick in.

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1. Know What Is Your Subject In Your Picture

Most beginners in photography will see a beautiful scene, lift the camera to their eye and click the shutter. They are caught up in the moment of beauty they see with their eyes, but then afterwards look at the picture and don’t see in there what they saw before. One of the first things to train your eye on is: Knowing Your Subject.

One of the easiest ways to improve your photography composition is by defining your subject. If you, as the photographer, don’t know what your subject is, then it’s going to be a complete guessing game for your viewers. When you don’t define your subject, the viewer’s eye will dart all over your photograph looking for it.

You need to find inside your picture, the Reason why you want to take the shot, and make that part stand out. Make it the ‘Star’ of your shot and let everything around that just be the extra information, which an eye can look over, but brings it back to your main Star-part.

For some pictures it’s easy, you can have a beautiful castle on a hill and that is your Star part, but for others with maybe a bit harder, like working with busy color backgrounds or people getting into your shot, and you need to define what is it you want to show in your picture. Let the viewer know what they are supposed to look at, and then give them the freedom to explore other parts of your picture.

There are a number of ways to achieve this:

• Play with shadows or highlights; make use of optical distance with a foreground and a background part. A little more obviously, and one most phones nowadays have incorporated, is by blurring the background and keeping the subject in sharp focus (by using a lower f/stop, but this is for another post)

• More often than not when starting out in photography, your subject will be the closest thing to the camera, as it’s the easiest way of composition (you can distinguish between your subject and the background). However, once you master this type of photography composition, I urge you to think a bit outside the box and let the creative side of your brain kick in. There are a couple of ways to play around (like framing your subject by other items around it) but I will come back to these in a more advanced post.

• Leading lines. There we go, that one you maybe heard of when reading other photographers comments. And it’s as simple as the word tells: A leading line will take the viewer’s eye from the beginning of the photograph, through the photograph, and to your subject. More often than not, your subject should be at the end of your leading line, so the viewer’s eye has something to look forward to and then can come back and forward again. It creates a visual interesting loop for the viewer’s eye. There are multiple ways to achieve this, from every direction and with many subjects, so I will come back to this also in another post. For macro photography this could be slighty different in the execution, but I wrote this to have a general idea in photography.

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2. The Simple ‘Rule of Thirds’

This one is one of the most basic photography composition laws. For someone who is struggling with the creative side of photography, like photography composition, but who otherwise understands different technical aspects of photography, the rule of thirds could help you better understand how to create great composition-wise pictures. More as something else, it is a way to visual please the eye, and brain, of the viewer.

To make it short: The rule of thirds states that every photograph can be broken down into nine different, evenly divided squares. Two of the lines run horizontally and two of them run vertically. To create a visual pleasing composition, you want to put your subject on any of the four crossing points of the lines. This ensures that your viewer knows that your subject is. This works as well in landscape as vertical oriented pictures.

The number one mistake I see beginners make, is in fact, placing the subject dead center of your photo. You have to think the way your eye works, and when your subject is placed in the center, very quick the interest is lost because there is no strain on it visually to keep it interested.

However, don’t’ get too hung up on it, as sometimes pictures where the subject are in the center (like a portrait) but use another extra input, like negative space, can be very creative and have a great visual impact. But for now, try to understand how this ‘rule’ works first, before venturing out into another field.

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3. learn how to crop

Make no mistake, and maybe I should have put this in first place, but in my eyes, cropping is one of the more powerful tools that you have at your disposal to dial in the composition of your images.

In many respects cropping echoes the fundamental principles of composition. Luckily, if you didn’t get what you wanted the first time around, when you took the photo, you get a second chance to recompose your images in post-production for maximum impact.

This is a controversial topic for some, but this is my personal opinion and if you came here I guess you like the way I shoot pictures, so I’ll get it out here: Don’t get too hung up on getting your shot right in camera the first time. That is not said that you don’t make special moments, but see it as a tool to just enhance that moment more. See it in a way an artist maybe deletes a part of his drawing to improve it, see it in a way the photography masters before worked their image in the darkroom.

I come from a cinema background, and one of the best advice in script writing I got, is that sometimes you have to “kill your darlings” if it doesn’t work, which can be translated in photography as “crop until it hurts.” Fight the urge to become attached to pixels. Crop out half of the photo if need be. Unimportant areas of a photo are not precious real estate and will take away importance to the viewer’s eye.

Look for elements that detract, distract or add little to the image. You may not have a choice but to include them, but it is a good practice to be cognizant of them for the next time you are out shooting pictures. Each photo is different, and there is no magic formula, but the fact of the matter is that simple is better. When cropping look for simple compositions and try to distill the scene down to its essence.

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Remember, these 3 tips are as much ‘rules’ as being ‘guidelines’, maybe that’s a better word for them. I see many beginners in photography writing that ‘I am breaking the rules’ with this picture, but just be sure you understand the generalized rules first in order to intentionally break them, and not being it a byproduct because you didn’t think about your composition in the first place. You will see that the whole of the connection between your eyes and your brain, together with making better pictures, is a wonderful experience!

So, that wraps things up for now and I hope you enjoyed this post. Above all, I hope it can help you see pictures next time you go out shooting. If you enjoyed reading it, let me know in a comment of course.

And you can always Buy me a Coffee of course :) Cheers!

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