CameraCrazy

This is a guest post by Andy Wong touching upon the basics of composition (hopefully a series of posts will follow).

Very often people taking up photography for the first time often wonder “what makes a good picture?” To address a component of this, I would like to bring to you a series of illustrated posts to explore the concepts of image composition.

I’m a beginner/intermediate photographer. I was interested in photography from a purely recreational standpoint - Simply put, I like taking pictures. I however was interested in techniques to make my photography more dynamic and interesting, so I’ve read from a variety of sources about this subject. This series of posts will go from the very basic ideas of image composition and continue into more advanced concepts. Disclaimer: these posts are here to serve as a guide, not rules of thumb. So it’s to show you what can be done, not necessarily what should be done when taking pictures. Ultimately you want pictures that both you and the other viewers enjoy.

For this first installment, I will illustrate the very common advice for beginner photographers - Fill the frame (aka. keep it simple).

I was visiting the Van Dusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and saw a Ginkgo tree (native to China) that interested me. When I first saw this tree, I decided that it was going to be my subject and I wanted to show the uniqueness of this species. I took the first picture of the leaves, hoping to use the sunlight behind the subject to emphasize the veins in the uniquely shaped leaves. Upon the first glance, this picture simply did not do its subject any justice. The picture is very complicated with branches everywhere and leaves shading each other, so the subject doesn’t stand out very much. Also the background can be a tad distracting at both the top and bottom of the frame.

Here I will then try to fix the problem by zooming in (so here’s where a zoom lens can be useful, because I couldn’t grow taller to get closer to the leaves), and taking a picture of the Ginkgo leaves.

There are four bits of improvement in this picture over the previous one:

1) Here the Ginkgo leaves have stronger sunlight behind them (less shading by other leaves), thus the veins of the leaves stand out more.

2) With a less complicated picture, the Ginkgo leaves are more able to grab the attention of the viewer

3) There’s a hint of line in the way the Ginkgo branch is composed from bottom right hand corner to the top left corner. We will get into this composition concept in another post.

4) The background is a bit less cluttered, thus the Ginkgo leaves are in great contrast with the background blue sky.

Of course one can zoom in really close and try to do a semi-macro shot of a single Ginkgo leaf. That’d take away much of the distraction and keep the shot really simple. However, I wanted to show that this is part of a bigger plant, so I still included branches, and also a hint of some more leaves in the background (right edge of the frame).

Here’s another set of shots on another plant utilizing the same concepts (without back lighting this time). Notice how simple it is to zoom in onto the subject, filling the frame with the subject to lessen distracting elements and backgrounds.

So go out there, take some shots, and try to zoom in (or get closer) and see if you can fill the frame. Happy shooting!