Composition in photography

Composition is the different between a great photographer and a bad photographer. You can have the most interesting person, place or object in front of you but if it looks flat and static no one well care. By adding order and directions to your photos you can lead people’s eyes into the image. This creates more interesting and hopefully thought-provoking images.

Composition helps you tell a story and add interest. There are many different parts to composition including your focal length, lighting, what you choose to put in your frame and where you put it in your frame.

Let’s start with focal length which helps show more or less of the background and what kind of compression you have. Lots of street photographers use wide focal lengths to show the whole environment to add more context and interest to the shot. This can give a unique look to their photography which I love. Portrait photographers normally leans the other way to longer more compressed focal lengths add more emphasis on the subject. This can reduce some of the background distractions and focus the viewer on the main subject. Both have different looks to them, but you should always try new different focal lengths to get unique images.

Lighting!!!!! I can’t emphasis how important lighting is. Bad lighting can make the hottest person on earth look ugly but good lighting can make anyone look interesting. Lighting is how we make the images look like it’s got more dimensions. Look at the examples below. The differences just from simple lighting is amazing and that’s just the basics you can try so many creative lightings set ups to get even more interesting shapes and forms.

For the last two ill combine due to them being very similar. Picking and placing objects in your frame is most difficult to do out of the composition basics. In the heat of the moment, you must work out how to place different objects with different visual weights and the elements could be moving. These calculations happen in a fraction of a second in some cases. So, learning what good composition looks like and practicing a lot can help you react faster. This dictions is based on how you want to show objects in your frame. Also, other rules like the rule of thirds and the golden ratio can play a part. Once you learn all the rules you then need to choose which rules you want to use and which you don’t, to make the perfect photo.

This is just the basics of composition but by thinking of them it can help you improve the way you think before, during and after taking the image.