Digital photography composition

How many times have you been subjected to a friend's holiday photos and tried to look interested as each badly composed picture is presented to you? This one has the top of the subject's head missing, that one has something weird seemingly growing out of the persons ear, and there it is, the obligatory photograph of someone standing by a famous landmark. Boring!

With the tips on this page you can do better! Then next time you show your pictures around, you will received gasps and smiles as your audience eagerly asks for the next one.

So what are these guidelines that help you learn how to take good pictures?

I covered the technical aspects on the digital photography basics page here we will look at composing the picture in the viewfinder (or on the LCD screen).

Digital photography composition - background distractions

Check for those trees growing out of people's heads and distracting background details before you press the shutter. And if you do spot them, try moving slightly so that they will not be visible in the photo.

IF you really cannot remove the distractions by moving your position, then you might want to make clever choices of shutter speed and aperture. Open your lens to its maximum aperture and focus carefully on the subject itself, and the background will turn into a soft blur into which distractions will disappear.

Of course rules are meant to be broken, and sometimes including the background can help put the subject of the photo into context. In the two pictures above, which one tells you more about the situation in front of the camera? The horse on the right is just standing in a snowy landscape but in the left hand picture you can deduce that he has been carrying logs to the machine behind him. All it took was taking a few steps to the side to make the picture tell a story.

Digital photography composition - vary the viewpoint

Photos of children, especially, benefit from being taken at their own level. Crouch or sit down and look at things from their line of sight. You could even place the camera on the floor giving an unusual view from below child's height. Anything slightly different from the norm will help you take better digital pictures that get a second glance when you show them to your friends.

Don't keep to photographing things from the side. Just think how "ordinary" the photo above would have been if taken as a sideways view? In fact in order to get the whole donkey in the shot the child would have been too small to recognize. Getting in close, and in front of the donkey, makes it much more interesting and shows both my grandson's and the donkey's faces. There is enough background to enable you to see that they were on the beach and that this was not the only donkey giving rides. Also the angle of the shot helps to eliminate any distracting background, such as the row of deckchairs that was behind them.

If you are using a digital SLR camera or a compact with a zoom lens try using a different focal length by picking the best digital camera lens for the job, and taking a number of photos of the same subject. You are guaranteed to get a variety of pictures this way. Take the photo above, of our village church. On the left I used the normal length zoom, standing a short distance away from the churchyard. Then for the picture on the right I moved closer and zoomed my lens right out to change the whole look of the photo. In the first the church is the centre of attention whereas the focal point of the second is the gravestone with the church in the background.

Digital photography composition - You need a focal point

To illustrate this let us return to our working Suffolk Punch horse. This photo, left, again puts him into context, showing us that he is transporting logs in the winter woodland landscape but what do you look at first?

Yes, the horse himself. He is the focal point of the picture. Your eye then roams around the photo and registers the logs in the foreground and the one that frames the top of the picture.

Compare this with the photo below of the Derbyshire peak district in the UK.

When the photograph was taken the view was impressive but the picture really doesn't do it justice.

There are a number of problems with this picture but the one I will mention first is the lack of a focal point. What does your eye rest on? Is it interesting?

I am going to guess that you either said the green bushes on the left or the greyish green circle smack bang in the middle of the photograph. What is that by the way? A pond, a stand of trees? I can't tell you for sure, as I didn't even notice it when I took the picture! It doesn't tell the whole story, it just leaves you guessing. Definitely a photograph that leaves you wondering how many more you have to politely look at before you can leave.

Digital photography composition - the rule of thirds

Dividing the picture across the middle like this gives a boring photograph, is it a photograph of the landscape or the sky?

What is the viewer meant to concentrate on?

By emphasising one or the other, the photograph would gain strength and be much improved.

You, as the photographer, need to guide the viewer into looking at the area you found more interesting at the time you took the picture. Give them a hint, by focusing their attention where you want it. Was it the sky, with its attractive cloud formation, that caught your eye or the pretty landscape?

The horizon in the next photo is deliberately kept really low to empasize the sky and the church spires reaching up to the clouds above. The flat, brownish field in front of the church held no interest to me as the photographer and, I felt, was best minimised as much as possible.

I have divided this picture into thirds with four red lines. Can you see how the main focal point, the church spires, sit in the area of one of the intersections and the large cloud at another? There is a tendancy for new photographers to place their focal point right in the middle of the picture which can make for a very static looking photo. Using the "rule of thirds" as it is known in digital photography composition, produces much more interesting photographs.

This isn't a rule that only applies to landscapes by the way, it can be used to great potential in portraits as well. When composing your photo try to imagine these guidelines and place a persons face or features at one of the intersections. If you don't manage to get it quite right when you take the photograph you can always crop it later in digital image editing software. In the photograph below, I set an intersection on my grandson's right eye.

As you can see by the faded area which will be discarded, it also allows you to remove any distracting elements that sneaked into the background, such as his Dad's arm and some of the beer can!

Now might be a good time to scroll back up the page, and test the other photos I have used to explain digital photography composition, for the rule of thirds.

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