I discuss lighting and exposure regularly on this blog, but these are just two aspects of making a photograph. One of the most subtle, and often most important, is composition. In composing an image, the photographer is deciding, consciously or sub-consciously, what the viewer will see in the frame, and what they will not. That’s a lot of responsibility.
As the photographer, you will have a memory, when you look again at the resultant image, of the environment in which you took it, of what was around you, and of what was going on. The viewer will have none of this – just the image that you have composed. So your image must often be carefully constructed to bring some of that experience to the viewer, and in a way which holds their attention long enough for them to begin to absorb that experience. The ability or inability to manage this as a photographer goes a long way to determining how successful a photograph is.
Over the next few weeks, I will touch on different aspects of composition, and attempt to illustrate some of the concepts with some of my own photography. This will be a learning curve for me in some respects, as I ramp up my own knowledge of composition, and will most likely require me to take some images specifically for those posts, so you can look forward to more never-seen-before photographs here in the future.
Today’s photograph is one from the archives, but does help to illustrate one of those concepts of composition that can help to construct an image – namely, using objects and shapes in the scene as natural framing elements.
The photograph is taken in Crete, at the same place where I took the image of the rooftops of Rethymnon that I posted last month. I was walking around Fortezza Castle, and noticed the low wall that ran along the perimeter, with look-outs positioned at regular intervals.
With the sun at about 2 o’clock relative to the camera, the light was such that while the city below was nicely lit, the look out in front of me was in shade. The contrast in the light meant it would go quite dark if I exposed for the streets below, and I hoped, would frame the scene nicely. In addition, the stone of the “frame” would give a little bit of context to the street scene, and suggest to the viewer something about where the photograph was taken.
Framing elements like this often exist in scenes and are just waiting to be used. They don’t need to wrap around the entire frame either – the trunk and branch of a tree can be effective in many landscape shots to direct the viewers eye for instance. It often makes for a more interesting image than simply zooming or cropping in on the detail at the centre of the image. The viewers eye will get there either way, but with a natural framing element, you add a little extra to hold that eye a little longer.
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