The Camerazzi Community

A Matter of composition

The Art of Composition
“WoW” photos usually combine artistic quality with technical quality. The artistic side much depends on composition which is an important visual concept in photography as well as in painting.
Good composition greatly contributes to the artistic quality of any photo and it is possibly the single aspect that I most crit in my photo comments on these pages.

The great Ansel Adams once said: ‘There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs’ yet his exquisite landscapes have over the years served as examples of excellent composition!

I am not a slave to ‘rules of composition’ but acknowledge that like ‘rules’ of written and spoken language (grammar), composition rules have been formulated by identifying the things that helped to structure many great works over many years. You don’t have to follow it to make great photos but you can’t go wrong in doing so.

Many articles have been published on the subject and the following web page provides many links to some of the best articles on the subject – pop in and indulge in some very educational reading!

http://photoinf.com/news.html

Photo discussion
The following photo was submitted to the Camerazzi facebook page by Noel Turner stating: I just love this photo. One of the best travel pics i have done.
I agree that it is indeed a very catchy photo – why? What is it that ‘makes’ it?
1. The subject – building ruins that tell a story
2. The mood of mystery

As for the composition:
1. Framing: the subject is pretty well framed with the supplementary red and green colours at the top and the path in the foreground that practically squeeze in the building between and hold it in the focal point.
2. Leading lines: a number of leading lines from the left leads the eye to and through the focal area, which is great!

Positioning
I do have a problem with the positioning of the subject dead centre in the frame. Now this is not necessarily an unforgivable sin, especially in this picture where we have some very good composition features countering the problem. The question remains however, could it be improved by moving the subject off centre and possibly apply the ‘rule of thirds? Why? Their could be various reasons: to improve the balance; to enhance the focal point; to make the picture more interesting; in short: to make a greater impact.

Best composition in a certain situation should be achieved on camera and not with the computer! Crop on camera! I have often seen people shooting intentionally wide in order to leave “room to crop” on computer – don’t, you pay dearly in quality.

The problem with cropping on camera unfortunately is that you cannot afterwards add more image to the left or the right or top or bottom to improve the composition… this is the exact problem that I had with this picture. in order to illustrate below the effect of moving the subject off-centre and onto the third-line intersections I had to use the crop option which unfortunately also have a zoom effect on the result.

Now compare the following

In the left is the original with the subject in the centre and in the right I have moved the subject slightly to the right. It is horizontally off-centred but still centred vertically – see the 1/3 gridlines below.

In the following two examples I have moved the subject both horizontally and vertically onto the top right 1/3 intersection and the bottom right 1/3 intersection respectively.

Now make your choice. Mine is the one in the bottom right.

I guess I would prefer it the same size as the original with the subject on the bottom right 1/3 intersection – just don’t know what the scene to the left looked like as it had to be extended to the left for this result.