by Rolando Gomez
return to our main tips page
Most photographers don't realize that one of the most important design fundamentals in photography is composition--we tend to take this for granted as we often get caught-up in the "aura" of the shoot, or the beauty projected by the model. We should never lose light of the phrase, "compose & expose."
Composition is not just how your subject is posing, it’s your subject and their pose, your background, foreground and how the film-format frame is filled, or framing.
If you keep this in the back of your mind, it will be subconscious in the future, and make your shooting successful. I’ll give you an example, back in my first days as a high school photographer, I started shooting with a medium format, Yashica Mat 120G, twin-lens-reflex, 120 mm film-format camera. This camera produces 2 1/4" square negatives at least five times bigger than 35mm negatives. Well eventually we made the switch to the 35mm format—my photographs were terrible.
After the photojournalism instructor handed me some severe critiques, I realized that it was either shape up or ship out—so I immediately became aware of my small, 35mm, rectangle format and had to purge the medium format out of my brain.
The point of this small story is to make you aware of your "easel" or film-format frame, before you jump out and start shooting. Next, you have to be aware of your surroundings. Sometimes your surroundings can produce a good frame for your subjects, such as a wooden frame itself, a mirror, a curved tree-branch, a door or entryway, or even a window.
Now while you’re composing and exposing and filling the frame, don’t forget about your background and foregrounds. These two elements of an image can be distracting, so use your lenses to separate the subject from the "grounds." Switching from a normal lens to a medium telephoto or longer lens can make a difference. Another alternative is to shoot with a wider aperture, such as F/1.8 to F/4.
A photographer could also switch to a wide-angle lens if the background and/or foreground had some importance in the image, as wide-angle lenses have great dept-of-field. One must be leery when using wide-angle lenses as they can distort your subject—angles become crucial with these lenses. As photographers we learn to control the shooting variables, proper lens selection is just one of those variables.
One of the strongest variables to successful shooting is subconsciously remembering to compose your image properly by filling the film-format frame with the shape and pose of your subject while paying attention to your foregrounds and backgrounds—compose and expose.
©2004 Rolando Gomez
return to our main tips page