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How to Make Better Compositions in Your Pictures
Composition: how you arrange visual elements in a picture.
I love composition, especially unorthodox composition.
I have studied a lot of the work of Richard Avedon, who breaks all the compositional rules in portraiture.
I have also been deconstructing my picture compositions, to better understand why they work.
There is no real “right” or wrong way to compose a picture. You can arrange all the visual elements in your frame as you please.
But some basic compositional ideas and techniques:
1. Have some negative space between the elements inside your picture.
For example, have space between any forms in your photo. Don’t overlap the figures:
2. Divide your frame into one vertical rectangle, and two smaller horizontal rectangles.
This is a nice compositional technique. Won’t always fit perfectly, but keep it in mind:
3. Diagonals
Integrate more diagonals coming from the edges of your frame, for more dynamism, energy, and “edginess” (pun intended):
4. Shoot with a grid in mind.
Here are some composition grids you can try to integrate into your photography while you’re shooting:
a. Horizontal (landscape pictures)
b. Vertical (portrait pictures)
5. Shoot from low perspectives
Shoot low, looking up. Put the camera on the ground. If you shoot with a phone, hold your camera upside down while shooting.
You can also shoot with a wide angle lens (28mm or 35mm):
One photographer to study is Alexander Rodchenko, who experimented a lot with low angles:
6. Tilt your camera (Dutch angle)
Alexander Rodchenko integrates many “Dutch angles”, which is tilting your camera to add drama:
7. Circular motion
Here is a photo where I saw a good background, and shot a lot. I got lucky to get some circular motion:
The master example from Henri Cartier-Bresson:
Conclusion
There are no right or wrong ways to compose a picture.
Just have fun, experiment, and follow your gut.
For me, I first learned photography composition via trial and error, and THEN much later I started to learn photo composition theory.
Therefore,
- Experiment with photography composition and figure out what feels like a good composition to you.
- Learn photography composition afterwards.
And the best way to study composition isn’t reading theoretical articles on composition. Just study the work of the masters whose work you admire, and try to imitate their work, then kill them.