Some photographs win awards and hang in galleries, while others get relegated to backup storage or deletion, and just as soon forgotten. One critical differentiator for those award-winning photographs is good composition. Composition, of course, is the arrangement of objects in your photographs and how these objects relate to one another. Good composition is determined by where you decide to place your camera and what you choose to focus on.
Some people just seem to have a natural eye for this kind of stuff but, truth be told, most of us need to learn it and, like most things learned, with practice, comes improvement. So if you want to improve your photographic compositions, have we got a treat for you: The American School of Paris has put together a free, short and informative series of slides on the subject here, broken down into six fundamental rules for good composition: Simplicity, Lines, Framing, the Rule of Thirds, Balance, and Avoiding Mergers.
We’ll be taking a more in-depth look at each of these specific areas in future blog posts. Your “homework” for today, should you choose to accept it, is to take a look at the introduction slides here — it won’t take but a few minutes — and then to think about why some of your photos are more appealing than others. If you can, take a small stack of your photographs and place them into two groups: those where you feel like the composition works and those where you feel like something might just be a little (or a lot) off.
As we work through each rule, you’ll have an opportunity to refine your assessment, review your photographs and think more specifically about how each rule was followed (or violated) and how you might apply your new knowledge the next time you take a similarly themed photograph.
Be sure to join us tomorrow — same bat time, same bat channel — for a closer look at the first guideline to good composition: keeping it simple.
