Revisiting Composition

IMAGE CREDIT : AARON CH

Hello folks.

I thought it was a reasonable time to revisit the idea of composition. I promise not to drown you in rules because that’s been done so much by so many it could make you ill.

What I want to cover instead is the idea of what makes an effective composition. Sure we can just hammer a rule on something and be on our way but that doesn’t reveal the why of composition as part of your craft as an image creator.

Why Worry about Composition?

Let’s suppose that you don’t play in the fool’s game of photographic contests. Let me be clear, I think competitions are mostly destructive and only really serve the substantial egos of the judges and act as a source of your best work for no cost, no attribution and no value to you. Contests talk about gaining “exposure”. Exposure does not pay the rent. Every serious creative knows that working for “exposure” is a fool’s game with no chance of winning or even scoring.

So if not for competition, why worry about composition?

Joy. Pleasure. The fact that your image gets viewed for longer than the 2 seconds granted in today’s idiotic world that is focused on volume, not quality.

If you make an image and after a month has passed you can look at it critically and still say you love it, that’s going to be due in a very large part to your work in composing the image. Sure you may have mentally followed some of those composition “rules” that you have heard ad infinitum and have stored mentally, and that is not a bad thing, if you use them as guidelines to be applied at your choice and not by rote.

The outcome of successful composition is first that you like the created image. You will find that you may not have had to do a lot of repositioning in post. That’s a good sign. While I believe that cropping is one of the most useful tools available to us, if you have to crop every image to make it pleasing, that’s on you. I see a lot of flower, bird and critter photos where the subject is dead centre. The image is typically sharp, well exposed and well processed, but it doesn’t hold the viewer’s eye because as my friend and superb educator Rick Sammon has said (and proven) dead centre is deadly. Is that a rule? It’s a guide. A guide that happens to be true most of the time. So before making the image at all, check your viewfinder or LCD and ask yourself is this an image I will want to look at for some time. Will it engage viewers in some way other than being just another pretty picture?

Pretty is fine. But taking a picture of something that is already naturally pretty such as a flower or a kitten, isn’t lasting. But if you look at such images with an objective eye, you will find that the ones that stick with you have a solid composition that keeps your eye in the image.

And really, isn’t that what we all want? For ourselves and other viewers to look at our work and spend some time with it? For it not to be disposable? With over 2 billion pictures being taken daily, and over 99% of them forgotten while being seen, as a creative is that where you want to be?

I don’t think so.

Composition is not the image. It is a critical tool in MAKING an image. You know what to do, now focus on that.

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