Understanding the Rules of Composition

Composing your images

When you see a scene or subject that piques your curiosity, there’s usually more information than you’d care to include in a picture. Nature is a prime example. Forests are a big green visual mass of trees separated by paths and the occasional splash of color. Mountain ranges contain miles of craggy peaks that look very similar. What looks absolutely stunning to the naked eye becomes visual chaos when you put the camera to your eye. There’s just too much visual information for viewers to assimilate. Your job is to bring order to the visual chaos by carefully observing what’s in the viewfinder and then deciding how you’ll compose the scene into a meaningful image that conveys a mood or tells a story. The following sections discuss rules of composition you can use to create interesting images. As you become a better photographer, you’ll instinctively compose images based on your style, artistic vision, and rules of composition. You can use more than one rule of composition when you create a photograph. But of course rules are meant to be broken and I show you how to do that as well.\

Using the Rule of Thirds

Undoubtedly you’ve seen lots of images where the focal point was placed in the center of the frame. Picture a lone tree in a vast meadow. If you photograph the scene with the tree in the center of the frame, you’ve created a snapshot, a visual document of the scene. Now picture the same image with the tree moved to one side of the frame and you have an artistically composed image. Viewers know you photographed a tree in a meadow, not a meadow with a lone tree. The tree is the visual anchor to which the viewers’ attention is drawn. The great photographers have composed images in this manner since the beginning of photography. Of course they probably got the idea from studying the work of great painters.

The Rule of Thirds divides the frame into three sections vertically and horizontally. A power point is where the borders of two sections intersect. If you place your center of interest on a power point, the image has more visual impact. Some digital cameras have a grid you can superimpose in the viewfinder that divides the frame according to the Rule of Thirds. The image above was composed according to the Rule of Thirds. I’ve added a grid overlay for reference.

In my next post, I show you how to compose images with light.