Resting - Breaking Down Your Composition

At 5:00 am the mosquitoes are hungry. They've been fluttering around all night with no people to snack on, and with sunrise coming, they know they don't have much time left to feed. They attack like they're invading Normandy; wave after wave, with no end in sight, but if you can withstand the onslaught for an hour, the sun will be up and the bugs will have high tailed it to their day time hiding place, surely in the bowels of hell somewhere.

I park my truck on top of the hill near the gate of the cemetery where I'm going to shoot this morning. The old gnarled trees, the rusted wrought iron fence, and the lichen covered stones are all silhouetted against a dark blue sky. I gather my equipment and press my truck door quietly shut as if I slam it and make too much noise the cerulean blind will go rolling up uncontrollably, dragging the sun with it, and ruining my morning of shooting.

ISO 100 ----- 60mm ----- f2.8 ----- 1/2

Oftentimes, when composing an image, I'll back the focus off of my image to verify my composition.

"What are you talking about Scott?" you ask. "How do you verify your composition by making it OUT of focus?"

The first element of the composition is always the shapes involved and their relationship to each other. The easiest way to assure that you aren't being duped is to eliminate the distractions, and reduce your viewfinder to it's simplest components. Understand the primary shapes involved; cubes, cuboids, spheres, cones, cylinders, and their 2 dimensional counterparts; squares, rectangles, circles, and triangles. Understand how they interact with each other and their place in the frame.

The second element of the composition that you need to understand is the color palette and how it works in your image. If you work in black and white like I do, you also need to understand how those colors that you are seeing are going to translate to black and white.

See what I mean? This is not a trick. The second Red/Green image is simply the first Red/Green image converted to grayscale. If you are shooting film, and don't account for this with the proper filtration at the time of shooting, you are going to be pretty much stuck. If you are shooting digitally, you'll have options, but in order to pre-visualize your image, you are going to need to recognize the issue and determine how you are going to handle it when the time comes.

Don't be Greedy

Quality, not quantity. Let me say it one more time. Quality, not quantity.

Ansel Adams once said "Twelve significant photographs in any year, is a good crop."

Twelve. One per month.

Now Mr. Adams definition of "significant" and your definition of "significant" are sure to vary wildly, but this is for certain, you shouldn't be shooting 36 frames on a Sunday, and be thinking that 8 of them are suitable for framing, display, or sale. You need to be much more stringent in the way that you look at your photographs and in the way that you perceive photography in general.

Digital photography should make it easier for photographers to be better editors, since it costs nothing to delete the 150 horrible images you shot yesterday and go back out and try again today, but it seems to have had the exact opposite effect for many people with cameras. They think that they can go out and shoot 150 shots today and 15 of them are good enough to show and then they can go out again tomorrow and shoot 150 more frames and have 15 more that are good enough to show. This leads to an abundance of mediocre and bad photography being displayed and watering down the pool of images available for viewing.

I once had a person with a camera brag to me about going out in the field and shooting 300 frames an hour. All I could do was laugh. It's impossible to go out walking around in the woods or in a city, and properly visualize, compose, and shoot 300 frames in an hour.

300 frames in one hour equals:

5 frames per minute, or one frame every twelve seconds. Do you see how ludicrous this is?

The rationalization for this, was that this persons photography instructor had told them that digital photography was cheap so that they should shoot a lot. Now either one of two things occurred here. The student was saddled with a well intentioned but misguided photography teacher, or the student simply misunderstood the intention of the teachers comment. Sure, digital photography is cheap, and that allows you to shoot a lot, and by a lot, I mean all day long, or every day, or as often as you would like without concern for the cost of film and processing. What it does not mean, is attaching a camera to your face and just running around tripping the shutter every 12 seconds. If that's what you were supposed to do, you could just get a 35mm motion picture film camera, turn it on and shoot 24 frames per second wherever you went, and cull through the resulting garbage looking for the one or two decent images that you might stumble upon. Even a blind squirrel will find a nut once in a while.

Every frame should be pre-visualized. You should see in your mind what you want the final image to look like and use your camera accordingly. Pointing and clicking isn't going to cut it.

There are three phases of competence in any skill:

• 1. Learning
• 2. Knowing
• 3. Owning

Applying this to photography:

You first are LEARNING how. You meter a scene for light to calculate an exposure and look at a chart to get the proper combination of shutter speed and aperture. You look up how the depth of field is affected by the aperture and adjust your camera accordingly. While composing within your viewfinder, you run through the compositional rules in your notebook, applying different ones and viewing the results.

Secondly you are KNOWING how. You step outside with your camera and look at the light. You know the proper aperture and shutter speed that you will have to use for a proper exposure and you know how the depth of field will be affected by the f-stop you choose. You hold up your camera to your eye and you move the camera around, knowing that a certain composition will work better than another one, all the while running through this information in your head.

Finally, you are OWNING the process. You pre-visualize what you want your final image to look like and you instinctively set your camera and compose your image to get the desired outcome. Now you might decide that this image isn't what you had hoped for after all, but at least you aren't operating with a scatter-gun approach.




"Wooden Vase and Flower"