In our on-going look at The American School of Paris’s free tutorial on the importance of composition, we turn now to the first and perhaps most important guideline: “Simplicity”. (If you missed the introduction, you can read it here and yesterday’s blog post about the introduction is here).
These slides encourage us to simplify our compositions by:
- Choosing uncomplicated backgrounds.
- Avoiding unrelated subjects.
- Moving in closer to the object of interest.
You can also make your subject appear more dynamic by placing it slightly off center in the frame. We’ll learn more about how to frame subjects in further posts.
After you’ve worked your way through the slides for this topic, please take a moment to go back and look at the photographs you selected after reading the introduction blog post. When you look at the photos in the stack that you just intuitively feel don’t work for whatever reason, are there any that violate the three guidelines above? If you could go back and reshoot these pictures, in light of these three principles, how would you simplify them in order to achieve more visual interest?
Join us tomorrow and we’ll take a look at the ever-important Rule of Thirds.
