Composition

Composition could be seen just as the arrangement of elements within your frame of vision, that construct an image, or it could be seen as the very centre of any body of work.

It doesn't matter if you have a romantic way of seeing images or not, the important thing here is that you understand why composition matters, and why it should be your prime concern, instead of deciding which camera or lens you should buy when you start your photography journey.

When I started studying photography, I was using a small film camera (Olympus OM1), and my experiences with that camera and single lens forced me to try and work out how to pack what I was seeing with my minds eye in to the small window that I was seeing through the viewfinder.

In order to overcome that early frustration I decided to focus on composition, just composition, and then I could worry about everything else after that.

Consequently I started to see details, settings and different environments in a way others weren't seeing, because they were dealing with so much information about exposure metering etc, that they didn't have the time to think about what was going on inside their frames.

Quick Tip – Learn Rule Of Thirds First

When I started out with photography, the first compositional element I really learnt was the rule of thirds and I recommend you practice this one too. The rule of thirds is a simple but effective approach to placing the subject in a photo.

All you need to do is divide your chosen scene into three equal parts – take a guesstimate or you can use the gridlines on your camera’s display. Then just place the focus of your image along any of the four intersecting points.

The results that the rule of thirds gives you is that your image feels balanced – of course, once you've mastered the rule, you can break it.

Photography is a Lie

What? Really? How dare you? Well, that's how some great thinkers of our day have called it. And if you think about it, it is true that photography is a lie, because it is a rendered image of reality, in a two-dimensional format; as a flat image, either rendered on a screen or printed out on paper

Our brains, since the day we were born, are trained for seeing the world in three dimensions, not two. And photography (or at least good photography) tricks us so well, that we don't perceive that they are two dimensional representations of our world.

Of course, there isn't only the rule of thirds as mentioned above, there are many composition elements that ultimately allow photographers to make things look more like reality, including:

• Lines
• Shapes
• Simplification
• Negative Space
• Framing
• Rule of Odds
• Rule of Space
• Rhythm
• Sub framing

Composition is important in photography for many reasons, but the most important of all, is the path, journey or story that it builds through a photograph when being viewed.

The path is the way the image is read by any viewers, and if there's no easy to follow path, the story that the image is trying to convey won't be delivered unless you explain the photograph.

Your images need to be able to speak by themselves, if they need you to explain them, then you haven't captured your subject successfully.

Composition is a valuable place to start learning about photography, but it is a vast topic, so to begin with I suggest taking a look at understanding composition, which will give you some fundamental understanding of composition.