COMPOSITION IN PHOTOGRAPHY

What makes a compelling photograph? Sometimes the content will be enough, but often it’s how the content is arranged within the frame – the composition – that makes all the difference.

It’s perhaps not so surprising that there’s been a fascination with 3D photography since the earliest days because it’s the third dimension – depth – that has a significant influence on how we see the world around us and interpret its contents.

When this dimension is absent – as it is for most of the time in photography – the challenge is then to make the two remaining dimensions work just as effectively in visual terms. And just to make things a little trickier, the frame of a photograph eliminates the wider context and references that you – as the person behind the camera – can see and understand but which must be conveyed to the viewer in a different way, often by inference or implication. But perhaps the biggest challenge of all is that everything has to be succinctly summed up in a fraction of a second.

The ‘magic potion’ for all of this is composition, which the dictionary defines as “the harmonious arrangement of the parts of a work of art in relation to each other”. This is fundamentally true, of course, but it doesn’t take into account the emotional – or even the psychological – aspects of how we humans decipher and process what we see around us… the associations, perceptions and interpretations that are born out of our experiences, expectations and knowledge.

For these reasons, composition in photography is a very powerful creative tool as well as providing the devices to deal with the limitations of a two-dimensional depiction. And, in photography, the ‘parts’ can extend beyond merely the arrangement of the pictorial elements to the skilful use of light and shade (i.e. exposure control) and of sharpness and softness (i.e. focus