Tip of the Week: Get More Creative, Dramatic Compositions With These Three Techniques
- For more creative portraits, avoid photographing the subject’s eyes. Instead, focus on hands, feet, lips, or objects of meaning.
- Try shooting landscapes in vertical aspect. The narrower field of view will force you to explore new and different ways of capturing the scene.
- Reflective surfaces are a creative way to document a cityscape. Try photographing the reflection of buildings in puddles or the reflection of people in windows for a more dramatic composition.
All photographers get in a funk from time to time and find less satisfaction in the images they create. It’s just part of the program of being a photographer – you have to learn to deal with the ebb and flow of creativity.
One of the best ways to emerge from a creative slump is to get outside your comfort zone and try new and different techniques. Expanding your thinking about how to compose a shot not only accomplishes this, but it also helps you develop new skills and expands your creative vision.
This week we have techniques for you to try whether you shoot portraits, landscapes, or cityscapes. Let’s get to it!
Avoid the Eyes
Portraiture so often focuses on the subject’s eyes that we forget that there are other aspects of who they are that can also convey a strong message. Of course, creating a portrait that doesn’t show the person’s eyes or face is more of a challenge, but that type of challenge is what can result in some truly dramatic compositions.
The task here is to capture the essence of your subject by photographing other parts of their body. The hands, feet, and lips are easy targets that often have a lot of character. You can pose the hands, for example, and get a different vibe depending on how they are presented. If the hands are clasped, the result might be an image that feels more tense to the viewer. Outstretched hands, however, can exude a feeling of openness.
There are also possibilities for taking portraits that include objects. Perhaps your subject has a beloved watch from his grandfather or a scarf from her mother. Incorporating these items into a tightly cropped portrait that avoids the face and eyes can make a powerful statement as well.
Put Landscapes on Their Head
Landscape photography deals a lot in horizontal aspect compositions, and for good reason. Many times, the goal is to capture the breadth of the scene, which is more difficult to do if you shoot in vertical aspect.
But, again, the challenge inherent in photographing a landscape in vertical aspect could be what gets your creative juices flowing once again. After all, it forces you to view the scene through a completely different lens. Rather than focusing so much on the breadth of the landscape, you must instead work in a much more constrained field of view.
That narrow field of view can lead to much more interesting compositional choices. You’ll likely find yourself spending more time examining areas of foreground interest and looking for vertically-inclined features like mountain peaks, cliffs, waterfalls, or trees. Shooting landscapes in vertical format also gets you moving about more, looking for new angles or perspectives that suit the vertical format.
Capture Cityscapes in Reflections
Cities are an incredible location to shoot photos because of the wide range of subjects at your disposal. You can photograph people, buildings, birds, skylines, bridges, and all sorts of other subjects that have incredible forms, colors, and lines. Then again, most everyone photographs cities in the same way, so challenging yourself to find a new perspective to document a cityscape can open your work up to areas of new possibilities.
One way to challenge yourself and generate more creative compositions is to view the city through reflections. Try photographing the reflections of buildings in a puddle. Capture people on the street by photographing their reflection in a store window. Or go indoors and snap an image of the reflection of a person or object in a mirror.
Not only does this push you outside your comfort zone, but it also opens up other types of photography. Try shooting in macro to get the reflection of raindrops on a building’s window. You can go in an abstract direction as well by focusing on a color or a shape in a reflection and framing it tightly. The point is that in your pursuit of the perfect reflection, you will learn how to see the city in a completely new light, which, in turn, will boost your creativity and lead to more dramatic images.
Conclusion
Whether you’re a brand new photographer, an enthusiast, or a pro, there will be times when nothing you create speaks to you, and that’s okay. When those times arrive, it’s important to push through your creative block and consider compositional choices that push your boundaries and get you seeing scenes in a totally different light. Give these alternative compositional choices a try the next time you lack inspiration, and see what wonderful images you can create!