The Tuesday Composition | Photocrati

The Tuesday Composition: Repetition

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

A while back we talked about visual echoes–and we primarily focused on repetitions of two similar or contrasting objects. Today I’m going to revisit that topic with a greater emphasis on repetition generally, whether two, eleven or a million similar image elements. If you didn’t get a chance to read the echoes post, I suggest going back and and reading it now, many of the ideas in today’s post will relate to and reflect on the ideas I presented there.

Repetition is a powerful and amazingly versatile tool.

One of my favorite uses of repetition in composition is in simplifying an image. In general, images with many kinds of disparate elements can be harder for the viewer to make sense of–put enough elements together and you take away an easy sense of what elements of the image are important, dominant.

Repeating patterns in an image can help organize all of those elements into a pattern that’s easier for the viewer to understand. Salt Polygons at Sunrise has hundreds of elements, but our eye quickly integrates the underlying pattern of the salt polygons and makes sense of what’s going on in the image. A random collection of that many disparate elements in an image would feel much more chaotic. (Of course, that might be what you want, but more often, my own work tends towards less chaotic.) (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Circles

View to a Chill, Greenland

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

A circle is the reflection of eternity. It has no beginning and it has no end – and if you put several circles over each other, then you get a spiral. –Maynard James Keenan

In previous weeks, we’ve talked a number of times about how the eye tends to follow along a line. We’ve usually talked about this in the context of the eye traveling from one part of an image to another, but circles are another variation on this theme. By bending a line back around to meet itself, we get a circle (or a similar closed curve). The eye tends to follow that circle, tracing around it one or more times, pulling attention both to the circle itself and whatever it encloses. (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Leading Lines, Perspective

Distant Thunder, Petrified Forest National Park. (Image made during NPS artist residency at Petrified Forest.)

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

Last week I talked about S-curves, today I’m going to talk about the related and more general idea of leading lines. Leading lines are one or more lines in an image, typically diagonal lines usually coming up from around the bottom corners of an image. In particularly lines such as those formed by streams, railway tracks, roads, or geology along the ground. S-curves are a type of leading line, but here I’ll be contrasting them with lines that are typically straight or more simply curved.

Many of the things we said about S-curves apply equally well here, the lines seem to draw the viewer into the image, bottom towards the top. Similarly, I find that images that bring at least one of these lines from the lower-left are a bit more likely to work better for me, again probably related to the idea that the way we perceive images may be influenced in part by reading direction. (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: A Few More Quick thoughts on Direction

Curves and Lines, Swanton Road. Reading direction, in additition to other factors, influence most Western viewers to "read" the curvy tree first, the straight trees second. — Curves and Lines, Swanton Road. Reading direction, in additition to other factors, influences most Western viewers to "read" the curvy tree first, the straight trees second.

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

Last week, we talked about direction in composition and how it relates to movement. There are several other themes that occasionally play into direction in composition, today we’ll briefly talk about a couple of them in no particular order. None of them are relevant to most images, but each of them seems to occasionally come into play when I think about how I’d like to compose an image. Perhaps a few of these ideas will be helpful to you as well.

While I’ve had trouble finding a good reference to the history of the idea, it has been understood for some time that reading direction has a cultural influence on how we look at images. In much of Western culture, we’re more likely to parse images from left to right. If there is an implied horizontal sequence in an image, we’ll probably read the leftmost object as coming first–or at least read it as the more primary object. This is far from an absolute. And in nature photography we’ll rarely have the opportunity to invert the world (at least outside of the digital darkroom), but occasionally I’ve given that idea consideration in composing an image. It’s interesting to take an image and look at how different it feels when flipped horizontally, I recommend trying it on a few of your own images.

A related idea comes from the world of graphic design, when you’re putting together something that mixes images and text, the piece will feel more harmonious if any motion in the image moves in the same direction as the text. (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Space to Move Into, Space to Look Into

Casual Climber, Buttermilks. — Casual Climbing, Buttermilks.

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

We’ve talked a fair bit about symmetry and asymmetry, it’s time now to talk about direction-various meanings and feelings that come along with where in absolute terms we place subjects in an image. There are several concepts “in play” when we talk about direction, so I’ll be devoting two, perhaps three columns of the Tuesday Composition to the topic.

The connection between direction and movement is a significant part of deciding where to best place objects in an image. When we have a moving subject in a scene, we often find it more natural when there’s more room “in front of” the moving object than behind it. That additional space we give the object to “move into” seems to suggest more movement from the object and can be part of telling a story about where the object is going to.

In Casual Climbing, providing the rock climber more space to ‘climb into” contributed to a sense of movement and also provided, along with other cues, a sense of danger and excitement. We’re left with no doubt that the climber is heading up. (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Visual Echoes

Backlit Foliage, North Falls — Backlit Foliage. North Falls

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

As we discussed last week, centered compositions often describe or emphasize a relationship between one half of an image and another. “What’s similar between these two?” “What’s different?” These compositions succeed because the image itself provides the answer to this questions. Reflections are a simple example of this, answering “it’s all the same”, making the relationship between the reflection and the reflected object a subject of the photograph.

But simple reflections and symmetries aren’t the only place (by far) where images take on life because of visual relationships we create between parts of an image. I refer to these visual relationships “echoes.” These visual echoes, like reflections, invite us to compare and contrast. But they can take on others forms as well, based on correspondences between line, form, texture and/or color. (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Sometimes Centering Does Work

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

As I’ve said before (and will keep saying), these photographic “rules” we talk about are more like dozens of tools in a large toolbox, and the vast majority of your images will only use a small subset of those tools. In fact, often there are very good reasons to do precisely the opposite of whatever one of these guidelines might seem to suggest, sometimes the rules themselves are contradictory. Today’s column is a case in point. Last week I explored a number of reasons you’d usually be better off not centering things vertically or horizontally in your images. This week, I’m going to mention some exceptions, but those exceptions are no more hard-and-fast as the original “rule” was. As such, I hope that you’ll not only get some ideas about why images might work well centered, but also that you’ll get a little better idea of what I mean by the “toolbox” metaphor. (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Avoid the Middle, Man.

Virga over the Straits of Magellan: The sky was more interesting than the water, so I used a lot more sky than water. Sometimes it's that simple. — Virga over the Straits of Magellan. The sky was more interesting than the water, so I used a lot more sky than water. Sometimes it's that simple.

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

Last week we talked about working the edges of your photographs. This week, I thought we’d start taking about where we place objects in an image; I like Geir Jordahl’s metaphor of choreography. By moving around, by pointing the camera in different directions, by choosing a framing and focal length and orientation of our shot, we’re including and excluding objects from our image, changing their size and shape and moving them around within our image. While we do not have (outside of Photoshop) unlimited flexibility to rearrange our images this way, we do have quite a number of controls over where we place in our images. So, where should we put them? Where will they look best? (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Working your Borders

The edges of your image (the borders, not the edges within your image), play several important roles in composition.

Puffin and Distraction, Iceland — Puffin and Distraction. Iceland. Don't do this! (Or at least, crop the distracting bit of bird, right.)

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

First, it’s easy for distractions along the border of an image to pull the eye “out’ of the image, and thus, they are usually undesirable. Highlights near the edges can be a particular problem. Edge distractions are best noticed and corrected for in-camera. One of the firm habits I have when doing landscape photography is taking a moment before shooting to glance around the edges of a photograph looking for distractions. If I find them, often only a very minor adjustment in camera angle or position is necessary to move the distractions off-stage. (more…)

The Tuesday Composition: Areas of Low Contrast, Negative Space

Tree Ballet, Mono Basin, California — Tree Ballet. Mono Basin, California

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

Last week we discussed areas of high contrast, this week we’re going to turn around and say a few words about low contrast areas and how they contribute in a composition.

At least one of these effects shouldn’t be too much of a surprise if you read last week’s column. If our eye tends to gravitate over time towards the high-contrast parts of a composition, then it more or less equally gravitates away from the low-contrast areas of the image. I won’t dwell on this aspect of it, if you want a nice, simple example start with the tree at the head of last week’s column and notice that the valley walls don’t pull your eye the way the tree does.

But as much as that’s true in last week’s tree, it is even more true for Tree Ballet. Save for three small areas of the image (the bare trees and a couple patches of dead grasses) Tree Ballet has no real detail or contrast whatsoever. Whereas the small amount of detail in the valley walls in Morning by the Merced will occasionally pull your eye in to look at what detail is present, the complete lack of sharp detail in Tree Ballet does not. We say that most of this image consists of “negative space”. “Negative space” is the art term for space around the subject of an image. The large area of this image devoted to negative space is important to this image, it emphasizes the cold, isolating fog. (more…)