Why Dead Centre Subject Placement is Deadly

Hey folks, last time I wrote about using your tripod as a compositional tool. There were the expected response themes, either great idea, I should do that more or I don’t carry a tripod, it’s too cumbersome and gets in the way of my creativity.

Whatever you choose, you’re right for you.

Dead Centre IS Deadly

I often quote my friend Rick Sammon’s compositional guideline that dead centre is deadly. What I have apparently failed to do effectively is explain why, so let’s explore that this time.

I enter this topic on the presumption that you want to make images that are interesting, that catch the viewer’s eye and that encourage the viewer to spend more time in the photograph, turning it from a snapshot into a better shot.

Visual Tension and Movement

When as a creative we place the subject dead centre, the viewer’s eye goes right to the subject. And stays there. This is the definition of stale or stagnant. There’s no sense of visual flow that encourages the viewer to explore the rest of the image and to see what contributes to the primary subject to make the experience more interesting. While we may have appreciated the dime store postcards we saw in our youth, for the most part they encouraged the one subject dead centre model and so are neither memorable or interesting because there is nothing for the viewer to explore beyond the primary subject. The perfect symmetrical balance kills any visual tension, whereas placing the primary subject in a different position, creates visual tension and keeps the viewer engaged.

Predictability

The challenge of dead centre is that it can look too symmetrical. Where symmetry may be a specific goal for a specific image, psychology teaches us that asymmetry is far more interesting and engaging to the human mind. Thus, an image that is overly symmetrical will look unplanned, boring and staid. Judges in photo exhibitions (and I am not saying you should listen to such creatures) will have a field day eviscerating such images for poor composition and being oversimplified. Moreover, the positioning leaves the subject to place to go, and no real sense of environmental context further creating the mental sense of staid or dead.

Missing Context

Context is what makes an image shine. Context is there to support the subject and to aid in the creation of the visual story. Without context, you have an Amazon ad image. It’s just a thing. By staying away from dead centre you include the environment and perhaps other compositional tools, like negative space, contrasting elements, more information supporting the story or even over used elements such as leading lines.

Exceptions

Placing a subject dead centre doesn’t always means a dead image. Architecture, reflections and balanced portraits will often benefit from the symmetry created. Perhaps you are intending for minimalism in the piece of work so you want no context or other elements. Keeping the frame full with a centred portrait can create a sense of intimacy. And of course you may be working to deliver a particularly graphic oriented image that requires balance and geometry.

You’re the creative, do what you wish, but if you look at your images and find the majority have dead centre subjects, it’s probably a good exercise to work on use of other compositional tools to get out of that centre rut.

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