Composition: The Definition
What is composition in terms of photography?
For that matter, what is it at all?
Firstly I believe it is the word that turns off a lot of young and inexperienced photographers.
It sounds boring, technical and just plain “not fun”. All of that can be true.
The argumentative rule breakers will say that it’s not necessary to know because we’ve all heard that rules are meant to be broken so why not just proceed from there?
It seems logical enough until you start getting into it. You may have a natural eye for design and create a lot of images that you and others love. Cool.
Like in music. You listen and then play without knowing anything about music theory. It sounds good therefore it is good. If it looks good, it is good.
While true, it misses the point that you are still applying the rules of your art.
Once you get to a point where you care and start to notice the patterns of your work you’ll start to notice those same patterns in the work of many others that you didn’t think had any relation to you.
Now you are starting to understand there are forces at work that you can’t ignore forever.
There are reasons that go beyond the scope of this post that people like things. Whether art or other things, the composition of the thing in question will attract some, go unnoticed by some and even repel others.
Once you’ve figured out what those things are then you are closer to being able to consciously expand your repertoire.
The first definition (of many) I ran across online from the Oxford English Dictionary states that “it is the nature of something's ingredients or constituents; the way in which a whole or mixture is made up”.
In photography, whether street or otherwise, the placement of the objects in your photo in relation to each other and their location within the frame is what we are talking about.
There are time tested “rules” governing everything from color relationships, luminance values and object placement that have made photographs and paintings before them compelling to look at.
It’s not random even if it seems so. If you are feeling a bit “cheeky” you can go and look at a lot of your favorite photos (paintings are relevant too) and see if you can notice what makes them similar even in seemingly dissimilar images.
If you are doing this I would strongly suggest you compare similar subject matter to begin with. It’s not very straightforward at first.
There are alot of things that can go into the composition of an image and I am not going to address all of it here. I will get you started and add more in another post.
Don’t worry though, you don’t have to cram them all into every image.
For what it’s worth, I have never seen an image in any medium that contained (or could contain) all the rules at once.
to be continued….
