All about Composition and your Camera

All about Composition and your Camera

ILLUSION

Introduction

How people love decorating things with stolen adjectives. The colour of music - they would say. They would talk about the music of a poem, the movement of sculpture, the depth of a landscape, the speaking likeness of a portrait. Do they mean any thing ? They do. There is sense behind these figures of speech. It is the indication of the artist's ultimate goal : to do more than his technique could produce by itself.
He will recognise the limitations of his craft and - fight them. He will struggle to create an illusion in place of those qualities which his technique must go without. The composer wants you to see the colour of his music, the poet wants you to hear the tune of his words, the painter wants you to feel the depth of his world.
The photographer, too, wants us to realise colour, space and movement, while looking at a piece of black and white paper ; and not just to try to make you believe in them, while he is laboriously explaining, "The sea was deep blue and endless, and those flying sails were white as a seagulls wings." If he is any good he will compel you to see that blue - that endlessness - that flight.

All about Composition and your Camera

All about Composition and your Camera

EMPHASIS

Light

Mass dominates over smallness, sharpness over blur and light over shade.
Light is the source and life blood of photography. It is the material which we are supposed to shape with our tool, the camera, and is a material superior to that tool. The effect of light will outdo any other effect the camera is able to produce. It will be stronger than any pictorial distinction which size or definition can create.
Even a comparatively small area of light will attract more attention and convey more emphasis than all the rest of the picture which is darker. Some blurred and even empty patch of light will draw our eye more strongly than all the shadows, however well defined and full of meaning they may be.
Light's emphatic power is so limitless and acts so automatically that it can be the photographer's pitfall. More than any other means at his/her disposal, light will tempt you to superficial exaggerations and confusing elaborateness. All the initial effort put into selecting the right subject, the right distance, the right view, may only too easily be scarified again by yielding to the temptation of playing around with light
Masterpieces of photography do not necessarily originate from studios with the most imposing lighting equipment. Even light cannot give emphasis amidst an orgy of lightness.
And this goes for all the methods of photographic emphasis : they live on contrast. Anything said just before may be found equally true turned the other way round in some cases. If the image is full of large masses, the sudden smallness of a detail may command attention. If the image is sharp all over, some spot of intentional blur may win importance. If the image is bathed in light, the only point of shadow may catch the first glance. Values are relative.

All about Composition and your Camera

All about Composition and your Camera

EMPHASIS

Definition

Human eyes see near and far, the whole and the detail, equally sharp. Normally, they do. They are quick, versatile and adaptable. In the minutest fraction of a second they will adjust themselves to communicate to us the profile of a far off mountain range, the shape of a butterfly's wing, the meaning of countless little letters in a book. And all these pictures will be uncompromisingly sharp, clear, well defined. Normally, we cannot see "blurred", even if we meant to and try to do so.
Subconsciously, however, our brains seem to record everything around us slightly "out of focus" - except the relatively limited area on which our eyes and our interest happens to be focused at that very moment. But that subconscious blur we do not notice at all as blur. The scene on which our eyes get focused is changing so unceasingly, and at such a speed, that we only too willingly assume a uniformly "sharp" world around us. After all, it is much more comfortable and secure that way.
The lens in the camera has slower habits, more mechanical ones. It will record at a time only one subject, one distance, as sharp, and leave everything behind and in front of that point fuzzy. Certainly the lens, too, is adaptable enough, but it has to be adapted. It has to be focused if we want some other subject at some other point ; and while we get that one sharp, everything else, including things, which appeared well defined just a few seconds earlier, fade again into blur.
This peculiarity of the lens, of showing only part of the scene at a time as sharp, helps to stress a point, to emphasise importance, to focus the spectator's interest - as we are focusing the lens - at the thing we want to be more than the rest. At the same time we throw the rest, the things of less importance, the background perhaps, out of focus. Push if back, as it were, into that "subconscious" department of our brain.
Photographing a face, one might focus just at the eyes, in a way allowing the nose, the lips, the ears, to fade gradually into a blur of insignificance. But one might as well decide to have the whole face sharp and blur a somewhat old fashioned wallpaper behind it out of existence. Or does just that old fashioned wallpaper fittingly accentuate the outlook of our elderly model? Well, let us have it. Let us have it as sharp as the face itself. it can be done.
It is happily in our hands to determines the depth of the field to be rendered sharp by the lens. It may be just a few inches. It may cover many meters. The shorter the depth of focus chosen, the more obvious the effect will be, the more intentional the distinction will appear.

All about Composition and your Camera

All about Composition and your Camera

EMPHASIS

Size

Things near the camera will be depicted larger than others farther away. The basic laws of perspective cannot be tampered with. Yet, the apparent comparative size of near and far will seemingly change when changing the lens. Lens with different focal length will open up different angles of view to the same camera. Lenses of long focal length give a narrow angle of view, producing a large picture of the central scene and leaving out most of the things left and right in front of the lens. Lenses of short focal length give a wide angle of view, producing a smaller picture of the central scene but taking in more of the things left and right in front of the lens. The difference can be appreciable. Lenses of the longest focal length may show a angle as narrow as 10 or even 5 degrees only,, while lenses of the shortest focal length may cover an angle of 75 or even over 100 degrees.
Obviously, the shorter the focal length - that is, the wider the angle and the broader the foreground - the more imposingly will subject near the camera stand out against everything placed further away. Reversed, the longer the focal length - the narrower the angle and the smaller the foreground - the fewer the chances of foreground subjects to be depicted as a whole, while the centre of the picture will be recorded enlarged, sometimes covering the background altogether.
The choice of the foreground,centre and background in conjunction with a carefully selected and a suitable viewpoint will amplify one pictorial element and reduce some others. It will make an insignificant tree-trunk in front of us domineering, while the ten thousand feet mountain peak, farther back, become a mere decorative addition - or vice versa.
But we can do even more. We can crouch down with our camera, making our subject tower over us; or look down, dwarfing it from some higher point of view. Low viewpoints will lift subjects out of their surroundings, making their own dimensions the only dominant ones in the picture. High viewpoints, in contrast, widen the floor space and introduce plenty of dimensional comparisons. Low viewpoints accentuate the outline of the subject. High viewpoints are likely to blot it out.
This, however, belongs almost to the next installment on photographic emphasis.

All about Composition and your Camera

All about Composition and your Camera

EMPHASIS

Introduction

Emphasis is the art of introducing proportion : making words, sounds, things of importance, stand out against a surrounding of comparative indifference. In photography it is the art of centring all interest on one particular quality of the subject. It is this emphasis - where we put it, how we put it and with what - which will make a photograph an individual piece of human work as distinguished from a dull example of mechanical reproduction.
How to emphasis, pronounce, under-score some part of the picture made by a camera? There are ways : we can differentiate by comparative sizes, we can render sharp or un-sharp, we can distribute light and shade. We can play all these cards together or just one of them at a time.

All about Composition and your Camera

All about Composition and your Camera

SELECTION

Try to Simplify

Once you have visualised your subject and agreed on the proper distance, set out to find the best side and the best sight of it. This amounts to putting it in the right perspective and the right light.
Again, it is easy enough once you have made up your mind what your subject is to be. Of course, if you just said "a few sheep," this would leave too many possibilities open. But you said "a few sheep casting long shadows over a meadow," and that is better. You obviously want those shadows to come out as clearly as possible : the drama and the pattern of them.
You will circle around your subject and look out for the side which shows both the sheep and the shadows at their best. You will try to get rid of all obtrusive detail interfering with the theme : the white sheep and their black shadows. You will not like patches of light in the foreground. You will not like patches of shadow in the sheep coats either. You definitely will not like any converging lines drawing the eye towards some far background. You have to eliminate all this detail. Search for the right viewpoint. Go round and round, hold your camera higher and then lower it again. This is the way to get down to your theme. You are now on your way to simplification.
The choice of the right distance has cut out matters inessential to your subject. the choice of the right viewpoint will suppress all detail confusing its message.
Again, just as the warning, "get close," does not imply that only close-ups can make good pictures, but merely says do not allow anything to creep into the frame of your camera's view which does not form an essential part of the subject you mean to show - so this advice to simplify does not demand either the stripping of every subject bare of all detail, but of all the irrelevant and distracting detail only.
Now whether some detail is irrelevant or important, whether it distracts from the subject matter or underlines it, does not depend only on what you want to show, but also on how you want to show it. It is a question of style. You can show the same man's face as a pleasantly-shaped surface, or a tragic map of folds, wrinkles and shadows.You have to decide on the message of your subject, just as you have decided on the choice of your subject.
Know what you want to emphasise before you start the sentence. The man who emphasises every word easily becomes unintelligible and unbearable in any case.

All about Composition and your Camera

All about Composition and your Camera

SELECTION

Get Close

You have decided what your subject is to be : a few sheep casting long shadows over the meadow.
Now go to it. Get close to your subject. You do not want the lake, the hills, the clouds. You do not want the horizon and the rising mist. You do not even want the whole of the flock to grace all over your image in disorderly manner. Get close to narrow down your angle of view. Leave out the rest. Leave out, leave out, leave out.
I know it is heart-breaking. But it is no use trying to weave two tunes into one song unless you are going to compose some sort of medley. (And medleys end so often in muddles.)
Do I mean to say that a "general view" can never make a fine picture? I certainly do not. But general views are so much more difficult because of all the single picture elements they may contain. Most of these elements display a fatal tendency to claim a life of their own. Take just this general subject : our soft hills in low sunlight. How to cut out the riotous sparkle of the lake? How to prevent those wandering sheep from disturbing the quiet of the scene? How to subdue that dramatic exclamation mark of a church spire?
Shoot your general view by all means. Do not be surprised, though, to get at the end one of those famous images which photographically more advanced people will cleverly split up into two, three or even more prints. Admittedly it is quite good fun to detect how many pictures may hide in one image. But believe me, it is never a really good image. A good image does not need and does not easily suffer "improvements."
If you prefer the part to the whole, take the part only from the outset. Why waste your time and struggle afterwards with all the mysteries of the darkroom ( film or digital ) for a patchwork art?
The size of your subject decides your distance. Whether the subject is large or small, whether the distance seems long or short : the right distance is always the closest possible one.

All about Composition and your Camera.

All about Composition and Your Camera

SELECTION

Be Direct

It sounds easy and it is easy enough. Yet nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand photographs fail because of the photographer's vague approach to his subject.
The photographer and his camera loiter through a fine summer afternoon and an Irish landscape. Soon a thin mist will put a veil on the green face of the hills. There is a flock of sheep and the clouds are mirrored by a lake. The silhouette of a church spire stands out on the father edge of this idyllic world and the faint outline of the village, behind which presently the sun will set. What a world! What a picture, the photographer thinks, getting the camera ready - and will surely devalue another piece of the best film material by exposing on it the image of this vague delight in everything.
Be careful whenever you get this "What a picture !" sensation. Get most suspicious and question yourself severely : what is what? Ask coolly what you are getting so excited about. The sheep? The sky? The clouds? The sunset? The mist? The meadows? Or just the nice country air?
Do not give way to sentiment. Stop for a moment as you start fidgeting with your camera and demand a direct statement : what are you going to photograph? The sunset behind the village church? The soft hills and the depth of the scene drawn by the mist? The cloud-dotted sky and the sheep under it? Just the sheep and their doubles in the lake? Perhaps that mirror of the water alone?
This is the decisive moment. Burst aside this tempting environment crowed with opportunities, beauty and sentiment. Be Shrewd. Recognise your subject. There are a score of subject matters in front of you. You are not going to get any of them unless you pick just one. Make up your mind. Have courage to argue. Do not be too shy to talk aloud. State clearly what you want to take. Passers-by may think you are mad. Do not care. You are not. You are taking your first step towards photographic wisdom.
You are just selecting your subject and are about to approach it directly.

All about Composition and your Camera.

All about Composition and your Camera

SELECTION

Introduction

Photographic composition is selection. As a matter of fact, all composition is selection. But with the camera we are confined to selecting things we can see - everybody can see. Imagination will not help us to the same extent as it does the man with the brush or the chisel.
We select our subject. We select the distance. We select the point of view. The rest will then be more or less automatically defined : the perspective, the lighting, the colour or tone values.
Admittedly we are able to do more : we can exaggerate the effect of perspective by changing our lens, we can add our own version of lighting by employing flash, we can apply correction to the tone rendering by using filters. We can go further : play around with the focus, the exposure, and even introduce all sorts of little tricks. We shall hear more about them shortly. Still the picture will basically be designed by subject, distance and viewpoint.
I have got three hints to go with these three fundamental elements of camera work : Be direct. Get close. Try to simply.

All about Composition and your Camera.

All about Composition and your Camera

COMPOSITION

Limitations

Photography seems a very limited art of expression after all, and those serious gentlemen of an older generation who told us so many a time appear to have been right.
But all the "legitimate" arts, too, have their limitations. Sculpture is colourless, painting two-dimensional and music invisible. Does it matter?
Neither do the limitations of the camera, as long as you recognize them, instead of trying, with innocent enthusiasm, to trespass on the painter's field of work. Do not attempt to "compose" your image as the artist does. Do not let yourself be confused by learned theorists, who would willingly lecture you on the art of photography, using all the imposing terms they can get hold of among bearded connoisseurs of painting, sculpture, architecture or even music.
You will probably find that most of these people have never produced a single decent snapshot of their own, and if you try to take photographs according to their ideas you will hardly get any either. The sun will set, the grass turn yellow, your subjects get dead tired while you are still meditating about some subtle point of aesthetics which your camera cannot cope with anyway.
Compose yourself, dear reader ; you cannot "compose" at all. Not in the arty, nineteenth century sense of the word.
("Is this about composition or is it not? Is the title a lie?" I am afraid it is Slightly.)

All about Composition and your Camera.

All about Composition and your Camera

COMPOSITION

Artists and Photographers

Much too objectively to please human taste. If you do not believe it, have a look at some painter's technique and compare it with a photograph taken from the point where he was working on his canvas. What has he done? First of all, he gave dominance to the real subject of his picture by spending on it his best colours and working into it much more detail than into anything else. Then, he took some liberties with the perspective. His foreground and his background appear less exaggerated. You can still see that things nearer to us seem to be larger than those far away, but his scale of perspective seems to be mellowed down compared with that of the lens.
From a purely scientific point of view, the painter lies and the lens is right. From the point of view of human experience the painter is right and the scientifically working lens wrong. Yet we cannot persuade our lens to be human, we cannot make it abandon the rules of perspective and correct its views according to our taste.
Just as we do not enjoy another privilege of the artist, who is at liberty to select, emphasise or leave out details of his subject as presented by Nature. If he has got four trees and a telegraph pole in the foreground of the landscape which he is going to paint, but thinks that it would be nicer to have three of them only and no telegraph pole at all, well, he just paints four minus one tree and that is that. Even a painter of the most realistic school will not have any scruples about omitting altogether from his picture a lorry standing in the middle of the road, if he does not want it to stand there.
But we cannot move that lorry if it does not happen to belong to us; and will hardly try to cut down even the most unwelcome tree just because if interferes with our pictorial intentions. We may play around with a still-life arrangement, just as a painter does. We may even persuade a sitter to move his/her head in one direction or the other, choose the background and adjust their cloths. But that is the limit.

All about Composition and your Camera.

All about Composition and your Camera

COMPOSITION

Eyes and the Lens

Our eyes are a pair of very versatile instruments.
Confronted with a landscape, they are seldom inclined to take in the general impression as a whole, but will be fixed for a fraction of a second on a group of trees in the foreground, then quickly follow the bends of s stream, rest on a swallow swooping down on it, fly up with the bird to the clouds, and all of a sudden come down to a little group of bright flowers somewhere in a meadow ; to be diverted again by a butterfly, or even by the foreign sensation of a sound in an entirely different direction.
The space in front of us may be much more limited, yet our eyes never seem to be resting. Instead of regarding Cousin John as a self contained portrait unit, those eyes of ours jump restlessly about from his hair to his shave, from his tie to his waistcoat buttons, from his pockets to his shoelaces, prompting our brains too all sorts of observations and more or less unkind if suppressed remarks.
The trouble is that our eyes do not stare or at least normally they do not. But the lens of the camera does. It stares most uncompromisingly.
Once fixed on a subject, it registers it will all conceivable detail, in its full width and depth, rigidly sharp and putting every part of the picture into its right place : the mathematically correct perspective. Cousin John's face will appear just as sharp and not all more important that half a dozen quaint souvenirs on the mantelpiece, in front of which he happened to sit ; and the inkstand, half-way between him and the camera, will suddenly grow to the monumental dominance of some historic sculpture. Have your eyes noticed that inkstand before? Have they seen at all that he was sitting with his head leaning towards the mantelpiece? Of course they have not. They have been occupied all the time with John in general. But not your lens. That lens did not allow itself to be distracted, and has been imperturbably staring all the time at all sorts of details. That lens does not distinguish and it does not select. It is a mechanical device; it is not only termed an "objective", but is objective and acts objectively.

All about Composition and your Camera.

I came across a book called "All about Composition and your Camera" a couple of weeks ago. This book is over 50 year old and explains Composition in photography which still holds up today in this digital age. I will be over the next couple of weeks be posting extracts from this book for you to read and hopefully learn from.
The posts will cover the following starting with the introduction here and then - Eyes and the Lens - Artist's and Photographers - Limitations - Be Direct - Get Close - Try to Simplify - Size - Definition - Light - Colour - Depth - Movement - Unity of Purpose - Unity of Matter - Unity of Manner.
So let's get started.

All about Composition and your Camera.

COMPOSITION

Introduction

As a matter of fact, I should have preferred to call this a spelling-book of photographic expression. Whether you will have any need for it at all I don't know. Happily, some people seem to be born with all kinds of knowledge. Others must just pick up their wisdom as they go, almost sub-consciously. Still, most of us feel more confident with some sort of reference-book within reach.
I am sure, however, nobody will expect to produce masterpieces of photographic art merely by memorising rules and adhering to them. Nobody is known to have ever become a poet by studying the rules of rhythm and rhyme; or a painter by reading all the theories on colour. But millions of people have been enabled to produce nice letters by learning how to organise their thoughts into paragraphs and how to compose their words into sentences.
"Composition" does not seen to have a complicated meaning after all. To compose a sentence, a letter or a picture, means merely to put it together in an orderly, purposeful fashion. Similarly, composing a photograph is just to organise its contents as clearly as possible : making our picture show the subject and only the subject which we meant to take, and to show it as we saw it.
Camera manufacturers promise a lot, but they cannot possibly claim to do this for you. True, you press the button and can be sure to get a picture. the question is only what kind of picture you get. You may be pleased with it, because you know what you meant to take and the image seems to show you what you saw. But look at the faces of your friends as they go through your images. If they are not very self-controlled, they seem often enough unimpressed, a bit douthful, almost critical. They may even be inclined to ask you questions.
Is that grey patch in the background the Wicklow mountains? And are these blurred lines in the left corner Sarah's toys?
This inquisitlveness is the more embarrassing as the picture in question was merely meant to show a family group picnicking - and just a family group picnicking. Not for a single moment were you considering the Wicklow mountains and Sarah's toys. Of course, they were there and some other things, too, but you did not care about them when pressing the shutter button. And although one cannot help noticing them now, they should still be of the same unimportance. Why should your friends bother about them ? Why on earth should other people's attention be fixed on such trifles?
I am afraid the main trouble is caused by the peculiar way in which our eyes perceive things and the definitely different methods of the camera lens.