The Importance of Composition
What does it take to take a good picture? Certainly, it requires more than a mastery of your camera’s various controls. If that were all you needed, anyone who knew how to read a camera manual could be Ansel Adams. No, taking good pictures demands a little creativity and a touch of artistry. Perhaps more importantly, though, it takes a solid understanding of the rules of photographic composition and some knowledge—which you can acquire as you get better at photography—of when it’s okay to break those rules.
Composition is all about how you arrange the subjects in a picture and how you translate what is in your mind’s eye—or even right in front of you—into a photograph. After all, the camera sees things very differently than you do, and in order to take great photographs you have to understand that and learn how to see the world the way your camera sees it.
Taking a picture with a digital camera is really no different from taking a picture with a 35mm camera. That’s why in this post we will be talking about the rules of composition: what they are, how to use them, and how to break them. If you are already an accomplished photographer and you’re reading this blog to make the transition to digital photography, you may not need most of what I offer in the following post. But if you’re not an expert, I welcome you to study this post. It is only through an understanding of composition that your images will go from snapshots—the ones that bring comments like “What a nice picture of a cat!”—to potential works of art.
Why Composition Is Important
Have you ever been on vacation, pulled out your camera upon seeing a picturesque view, and then been somewhat underwhelmed with the final results? If so, you just learned the first rule of photography: reality, as seen by your camera, is quite different from what you see with your own eyes. If you frame all of your pictures without taking that into account, you will always be disappointed.
There are a few reasons why what your camera sees is different from what you see. First of all, your eyes aren’t little optical machines that function in a vacuum. Instead, all that you see is supplemented, enhanced, and interpreted by your brain. In a sense, when you see a majestic landscape while hiking through the backwoods of Kauai, some of the splendor of the scene is actually being added by your mind. Lift the camera to that same view, and you get a totally objective representation of the scene, without any intelligent enhancements. That’s because the camera actually is a little optical machine. And it does not have a brain.
And then there’s the fact that a camera has a much more limited range of focus, exposure, and composition than you do. When you look at a scene like the Hawaiian landscape I just mentioned, you might think you’re seeing a fairly static scene with your eyes. But that’s not really the case. In fact, as your eyes dart around, you are constantly recomposing the scene, since you can dynamically change the visual “frame” in which you are viewing the scene. To make matters worse (for the camera anyway), the aperture of your eyes, called the pupil, changes size constantly in response to the changing lighting conditions of where you’re looking. The result? You don’t realize it, but your eyes, working in conjunction with your brain, are creating a visual feast that is difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce on paper.
In comparison, it’s amazing that we can get good pictures at all with a camera. Film—and by film I mean both 35mm and digital—has a much narrower exposure range than your eyes because the aperture freezes a single instant in time with a fixed set of lighting conditions. And unlike the magical pictures in the Harry Potter series of books, real photographs cannot change their composition or framing on the fly. What you see in the viewfinder is, unfortunately, what you are stuck with forever.
What We See
Look around. What do you see? If you look carefully, you’ll notice that your field of vision is a rectangle with rounded corners—almost a wide ellipse. In other words, we see the world panoramically. While there are some cameras and some techniques for creating panoramic photographs, most of the time this is not the kind of shot we take.
Nope—our job as photographers is to take the panorama that we see with our own eyes and translate it into an attractive photograph using the laws of photographic composition.
