Photo Tip of the Week: 3 Composition Techniques Every Photographer Needs to Know
- Leave space in your composition for your subject to breathe or move. Place your subject toward the edge of the frame, with negative space in front of them. The result will be a much more dynamic image.
- Use natural or man-made frames to help isolate your subject in the image. Trees or doorways are easy options to help frame your primary subject.
- Cropping can help you compose an interesting shot. When cropping, avoid taking just a little bit off the image. Instead, try heavy cropping. When cropping people, for instance, crop out their legs and torso, their left or right side, or even the top of their head. Doing so can lead to a much more creative image.
There are all kinds of photography composition tips and techniques out there. Most photographers are well aware of the rule of thirds and the notion of including foreground interest. Most of us also know that lines, textures, and patterns make for a more interesting composition as well. But there are a few techniques that aren’t as well known. Those techniques are the topic of this week’s Tip of the Week!
Leave Space
When framing your subject, be sure to leave space for it to “breathe.” This is generally accomplished by framing the shot such that your subject is to one side of the frame, looking toward negative space on the other side of the frame. This is especially useful when your subject is a person, as in the image above. The framing gives a sense of space toward which the woman can look. It also allows the viewers’ eyes to follow her gaze from her eyes all the way to the right of the shot.
Leaving space also gives a sense of implied motion. If you’ve got a subject that’s moving when you photograph it, there needs to be room for it to travel within the frame, as the image above demonstrates. The car is clearly moving to the right, and with the negative space on the right side of the frame, our eyes are led further in the direction of travel. Thus, implied movement!
Framing the image without the space to travel can result in the subject looking “stuck.” This is because our eyes need some visual freedom to carry the subject’s movement forward. In the image above, we know the car is moving toward the right, but without any room in the frame for it to advance, the feeling of movement is diminished.
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Isolate Your Subject
There are numerous ways to isolate your subject in your image. Most often, this is achieved by using a wide aperture to get a shallow depth of field such that the background of the image is blurred while your main subject is in focus. The image above epitomizes this technique. The little girl is in sharp focus while the background is nicely blurred. As a result, the girl is isolated in the frame, and our eyes are immediately drawn to hers.
However, another technique for isolating your subject is to use a frame. Frames can be something natural, like foliage, or something man-made. In the image above, the side of the building, the stairs, and the railing all work together to frame the dog and force our eyes toward him.
The same principle applies to this image as well. The branches of the tree on the left serve to frame the top of the image while the tree trunk in the foreground at right frames that side of the image. The result is that viewers’ attention is driven toward the primary subject, the lake. Even in a scene in which there is a lot going on, using this framing technique can still serve to isolate the subject of the photograph.
Crop Those Bodies!
Cropping can be a tricky proposition, especially when cropping an image of people. The major problem that photographers run into when cropping is that they don’t crop enough. Taking just a sliver off the top of someone’s head, hand, or foot will look like a mistake rather than something that was done to improve the composition. In the image above, the man looks like he’s lost a foot and part of his right leg because of the way in which the image was cropped.
A good rule of thumb to follow is that if you are going to crop a person, crop hard. Don’t take a sliver off – take a huge chunk, as was done in the image above. It’s not typically recommended to cut a subject’s head off above their eyes, yet doing so in this case resulted in an extremely interesting and creatively composed shot.
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Conclusion
Whether you primarily take images of people, places, or things, you can utilize the tips we’ve outlined here to compose a more interesting shot. Leaving negative space in the frame helps give your subjects room to breathe and move while using a shallow depth of field or natural or manmade frames can help you isolate your subject and draw more attention to them. Cropping can also be utilized as a compositional tool to remove unwanted or unneeded areas from the frame. Just be sure that when you crop, you go big instead of taking little bits off here and there. The results will be far more visually appealing!