Aphid and Desert Sunflower. A ground up, rather than eye-level, perspective, was an essential part of making this image pop. © Joe Decker

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

The week before last we talked about moving: about what a difference moving a foot to the left or right, forward or back can make in a composition. Today we’ll continue along that theme, talking about what a difference moving higher or lower can make.

We often photograph from “eye-level.” It’s a fairly natural tendency, if we make photographs after seeing things that move us, we’ll typically end up finding compositions at eye level. This is a good choice for point of view, photographing from “eye level” often produces images that read very naturally to the viewer.

But “eye level” isn’t always your best choice.

Sometimes shooting from lower perspectives comes naturally. When photographing small desert sunflowers in Joshua Tree National Park a few years back, it never occured to me to photograph from eye level because in many cases the flowers were only a foot or less off the ground. It was and is natural (and effective) to get lower and closer to these flowers.

Aphid and Desert Sunflower, however,  took “getting lower” even farther, moving below the level of the flower in order to place it against an overcast sky. Not only does this make for a nice 70s color scheme, but perhaps more importantly, it helps us see from something closer to the aphid’s point of view, connect with the high aspirations that it’s easy to anthropormorphically project onto it.

Low points of view are often useful in creating dramatic near-far compositions-when we really want to emphasize the foreground in a wide-angle composition we’ll need to be close to that foreground, and often eye level is just too far away.

Higher perspectives are a different matter entirely. Sometimes they’ll come naturally, as we look down on a landscape from the top of a mountain or cliff. These very high perspectives can be quite interesting, and sometimes help convey a sense of vastness, as in MacDonald Valley and the Livingstone Range. Often these images end up being peaceful and perhaps a little bit detached, more like we’re flying over the landscape rather than immersing ourselves in it.

But there are other situations in which it is less natural to consider a higher perspective, and yet quite useful. Many photojournalists understand this from experience, if you have a big crowd of people it’s going to be difficult to make a photograph that communicates that from eye level. Instead, if you reach up with your camera and shoot with a wide angle from overhead, you’re more likely to be able to capture both some of the scale of the crowd but also still grab some action from the people surrounding you, this is a classic “show the crowd” shot.

Thule Tent Ring. (outtake) Camera position is probably about 8 feet in the air. Increasing the ISO and opening up to f/9 allowed a fast enough shutter speed to (barely) show some of the arrangement of rocks in the tent circle. © Joe Decker

Moving your camera up isn’t always so obvious, or, for that matter, easy. I received an excellent lesson on this point some years back when I had the opportunity to visit East Greenland, a trip that was in part a workshop with National Geographic legend Frans Lanting. We came across some ancient Thule rock circles a few miles inland in within  Scoresby Sund, and Lanting poised the question to me of how to bring out the sense that the rocks were in a large circle, most eye-level perspectives reduced the circle to a narrow line.

He pointed out that the circle would be a lot clearer from, say, ten feet above the ground, which left me thinking (and I was a bit slow here), how am I going to get my tripod that high? His answer was simple yet, at the time, completely unexpected. He demonstrated holding his tripod (camera well attached) way over his head, triggering the shutter through use of a 2-second timer), and achieving the right composition with a combination of repititive trial and error, and a little bit of horizon levelling and cropping in post.

Don’t let yourself be limited by the convienence of eye-level, when photographing, keep an eye on the ways in which raising or lowering your camera can bring new perspective and interest to your compositions.

Over the past few months I’ve noted a couple dozen compositional “ideas”, not so much rules as tools that you can use to make more effective photographs. But this leaves a question hanging: How do I actually use all these ideas in practice?

Petroglyphs. © Joe Decker

I wish I had a pithy answer for that, but I don’t think there is one. In practice, the right way to approach a new situation comes from intuition and experience, learned by example after example after example. Some of the next few posts in this series, including this one, will take a single image and try and dissect my process, my thinking, when I was creating the image.

I’ll start with a petroglyph image I made in the Eastern Sierra during a visit last month for workshop scouting.

First, let me set the scene: The petroglyph panel in the foreground of this image is nearly horizontal and quite large, with well over one hundred glyphs. It is not well-protected. As such, the ways in which I’m willing to work this panel are strongly constrained by the desire to protect the panel-from vandalism, from damage that might occur if someone were to walk on the panel (scuffing, etc.), and from the damage that even skin oils can do to the “varnish” the glyphs are carved into. This limited my vantage points to places I could get to without damaging the panel, and views that don’t “give away” precisely where the panel is located.

While this is an extreme example, as photographers we are often constrained (by fences, physics, law or ethics) in what compositions we can make. Those constraints are often part of the dance of composition.

Trying to not show a lot of detail (save for distant mountains) beyond the panel meant shooting low, close to the panel. I did want to include the snow-covered mountains, which forced the choice of a particular side of the panel to work from. “Shooting low” suggested a near-far composition, which meant selecting a couple of particularly interesting glyphs (concentric circles, and the square grid) to serve as foreground anchors.

In short, the constraints on taking the photograph suggested a style of composition, and that style led me by the hand to keep in mind a particular guideline (interesting foregrounds are a must for near-far compositions.)

The two diagonal lines that run through the composition were obvious ready-made leading lines, and I first tried working the image so that they’d run from lower-left to upper-right. At the time, I was thinking that I wanted a left-to-right reading direction and felt that viewers would start at the bottom of the composition, so that was a natural thing to try first, but distractions (off-frame on the left) left me not liking that choice. So, I moved so that the diagonal lines would show lower-right to upper-left. The rock at the far end of the panel ended up making a nice echo of one of the mountains from that position; the combination of that and the leading lines clicked into place as “the right point of view.”

The sky was grey and overcast with little detail; I knew that there was a danger that it would form a bright white area in the image that would grab the viewers’ eyes and then proceed to bore people to death. The best solution to this problem would have been to come back in different light, but I wasn’t able to do that on this trip.  Instead, I darkened the sky in post with the digital equivalent of an ND grad, and used a vertical composition with only a small slice of sky to minimize the amount of image given over to the sky. It helped, the sky doesn’t pull the eye from the glyphs too badly.

As you can see, external constraints, various compositional theories, and even a little trial and error all came into play as I composed this image, in no predictable order. This wasn’t a purely analytical process, it was an intuitive, “trying to find a good fit” process. Such is the nature of composition.

Keep moving!

Skägafoss Detail

One of the best things about giving “shoot and critique” workshops is that I get the opportunity to see what participants can make out of a given situation. It’s great to see how different and interesting their visions are-I constantly learn things from my students by observing their photographic vision. But it’s also a great environment for me to be able to give knowledgeable feedback. Over the years, one of the most common themes I’ve seen in my feedback, particularly to beginning photographers, is suggesting that the image might have improved if the photographer had moved a little-whether left, right, forward, back, up or down.

Every movement of the camera and photographer changes the “choreography” of the images, some subjects get bigger, some smaller, and the position of the elements involved changes as well. Perhaps some appear – or disappear – around other objects. The positioning of the objects in the frame changes as well, movement is a powerful photographic tool.

Skägafoss Detail II. Moving a couple paces to the left (and adjusting the composition with a little zoom as well), let me abstract this image even more. That doesn't make this one better or worse, but it is pretty significantly different in a way that just zooming wouldn't have accomplished.

Even small changes in position can make a big difference in an image. Hiking to the top of Skägafoss the day before yesterday, I had some soft light that I thought would work well for long time exposures, creating detail shots at the top of the waterfall that juxtaposed the soft blurred water with textured, solid rock. I’ve included two relatively similar images from that hike here, which were taken only a couple paces from each other, but the change in perspective is significant. In one image the rock at the far side of the waterfall is visible and an important element. In the second, a a few seconds and a few paces later, that rock wall is shifted off the left side of the frame, resulting in a significantly more abstract image.

Sunset over Vestmannaeyjar. What a difference twenty kilometers makes!

At the other end of the scale, sometimes it’s possible to make use of much larger movements. Later that same evening, I noticed some interesting rays coming through the clouds in the distance, and several degrees to the side, the Westman Islands (Vestmannaeyjar)  at a similar scale.

I honestly wasn’t sure if this would work, that is, if the two were at different enough differences that I could change their relative perspective easily, but over the next few minutes it became clear that by driving (at about 90 kilometers per hour) back west that I could bring the two together. (The clouds were moving as well, but my own movement seemed to be a greater effect.) I was as surprised as anyone when the rays stuck around for the 15 minutes or so that I continued driving. The last few minutes I started looking for a workable foreground element. I eventually got several shots of the elements together, realizing an image that I had started composing perhaps 15 or 20 miles away.

And that’s the heart of the matter. Learning to see that “this is nice, but there’s probably even a better location over there” before you get there an essential photographic skill.

Watch out for “zooming when you should have moved.” I’m as guilty of this as anyone. All too often, with a tripod set up and the camera in position, it seems a little easier to zoom in on a subject rather than to take a step forward or backward. Sometimes that’s the right choice (of course), and sometimes moving isn’t possible (perhaps there’s a wall in the way, or perhaps the best arrangement could only be captured from a position several feet on the wrong side of a cliff. But sometimes it’s helpful to move in or move out (and perhaps zoom) to, in part, compensate-particularly when this lets you eliminate distracting elements, or to get a better proportion of the size of the elements in the image.

Godafoss Detail

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

I’m about five days into a trip through parts of Iceland (yes, in January and February), and thought I would share couple of short thoughts that have come up this week as I’ve been working, along with a few unfinished images from the trip.

First, yes, it is in fact cold here. Most of the areas I’ve been working in are relatively coastal (save for the Myvatn area), and so temperatures aren’t quite as cold as you might think: The coldest temperatures I’ve worked in this trip have been about -13C (or 9 degrees F). I’ve worked at lower temperatures in Mono Lake. Still, it is noticeably brisk. One thing that’s been on my mind, as a result, is thinking about how to communicate the sense of that cold in an image.

In most of my images on this trip, communicating “cold” has come down to one of two ideas (or both)–color, and the presence of ice or snow.

Icelandic Horse Example

I tried to add a few Icelandic horse portraits to my collection today, and I wanted to include a little “sense of winter” in the image as well. Many of the first sets of horses I came across weren’t very well placed. Late in the day, I came across a small set of horses on a ridge along the highway. There, I was able to find an angle where I could put a snow-covered set of mountains in the background of my horse shot. And, while the example here is not a great image, it does manage to convey (through the mountains, and to a lesser extent the blowing mane) a sense of cold a little better than many of my previous images from the day did.

Cool colors are also an important tool. A gentle and non-dogmatic hand on the white balance sliders (or warming filters, for those of you still working with film) is critical for best effect. I’ve shot winter scenery often with the white balance adjusted to show snow as perfectly white. That can work great, but images balanced that way don’t always send such a clear signal of “cold” as those that leave a little “cool” in the image.

Hraunfossar Detail While the crazy blue glacial water certainly contributes some sense of cold, the blue highlights in the waterfall and the sapped cool light on the grasses on top are what really help our eyes read this as cold and shaded. The light here was very blue (this was corrected with a 7500K WB setting, but retained this much blue even at that white balance.)

A slightly cooler than “correct” (whatever that means) white balance can take on very different feelings. In Hraunfossar Detail, an under-corrected shade white balance leaves the image kinda dark and gothic. In contrast, Godafoss Detail is a much more cheerful winter image, with bright new snow and a poppy blue glacial river. But both images share one thing… a detectable cool cast to the color rendering.

Speaking of the cold, I was reminded of something I said at the end of my article about “rules” a couple weeks back. In that post, I said that rules have an important place in the photographic learning process, not because they are necessarily something you intellectually work with when you’re shooting, but because learning about them (as well as doing a lot of shooting on your own) are things that help you build your photographic intuition, your eye. It’s  that intuition that enables you to create stronger images.

What’d I’d add to that discussion is this: Good intuition is particularly important when you’re working in a hurry. Whether it’s because you’re working with wildlife, or with quickly changing light, or even if it’s just because it’s very, very cold outside the car, being able to work quickly and intuitively to a situtation can make the difference between a successful hurried image and an unsuccessful one. I don’t like to work “in a hurry”, and I usually don’t, but it’s nice to know that when I do, my habits and intuition are geared towards giving me a better shot at a good image than I’d have if I worked more analytically.

Now, off for hot chocolate.  Have a great week!

Desert Rhythms III

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

I can’t say that they’re best sellers for me, but I really enjoy pattern shots. Nature often offers us regular and irregular patterns of exciting, dizzying complexity. I just can’t get enough of ‘em.

There are several thing to keep in mind when working to create a great pattern shot.

The simplest is to remember that, in making a pattern shot, you’re often working to maximize abstraction. The simplicity and repeititon of a pattern shot makes it easy for the viewer’s eye to notice imperfections and intrusions, so eliminating unwanted details from a pattern shot is even more criticial than it would be in a more conventional landscape image.

If you’ve got a location that has some great looking patterns, first identify areas where the pattern is strongest. Then use don’t just zoom into the pattern to eliminate distractions, explore the scene by both moving your camera position and zooming in to find the cleanest perspective. Your feet are two of your most valuable photographic assets.

Desert Rhythms VIII

Consider whether your subject is better served with a square (perpendicular) view or one that conveys a little more perspective. It’s impossible to completely generalize, but (for me) views with perspective offer the ability to show the pattern at different scales, and to communicate a sense that the pattern may coninue out into the distance. Coming in “square”, on the other hand, can be useful when you want to create a very geometic image, show symmetries (say in tile patterns, etc.) For the pattern shots of my Desert Rhythms series, I primarily used an angled perspective in an attempt to convey the vastness of the patterned dunes.

Mind the details, pattern shots are unforgiving of poor technique. The combination of this sort of perspective and longer focal lengths often presents challenges for keeping everything in focus. Be very aware of depth of field issues, and if you have access to tilt-shift lenses or view camera movements make these shots, consider using them for their ability to tilt the plane of focus down to follow the surface of the pattern. I didn’t have access to those movements at the focal lengths I was using for Desert Rhythms, so I did a lot of shooting at f/25, f/29 and even f/32, often shooting a particular scene at multiple apertures to allow me to select the image that kept depth-of-field while minimizing diffraction blur.

Consider the introduction of a focal point, subtle or otherwise. I mentioned before that an intrusion or an imperfection in a pattern will stand out in many types of pattern shots. While this can be a problem, it can also be an opportunity for directing the viewer’s focus. The small bit of plant in Desert Rhythms III serves to set a “starting point” for the viewer’s eye in the image, from which the eye will likely move to the right of the image as the sand ridges diminish and eventually fade away.

Desert Rhythms II (Click to see more detail, this image really needs the extra size.)

Experiment with the what scale your patterns should take on in the image and on the print. The Desert Rhythms series features images at a variety of scales, with Desert Rhythms II probably being the densest pattern and VIII being the least dense. The densest patterns will work most effectively as very large images, Desert Rhythms II doesn’t even begin to “come to life” as a print until it’s about 16 inches wide, and 24- and 32-inch prints would be substantially more effective.

Finally, pay close attention to color (if it’s a color image) and contrast. The quietness or loudness of a pattern image is largely a matter of saturation and contrast, even small changes in the hue, saturation, global contrast and clarity (local contrast) can have a substantial effect on the feeling of a pattern image. This isn’t simply a matter of post-processing, the color and direction of the light on a surface pattern often has an enormous effect on the captured pattern.

Puffin IV. Látrabjarg, Iceland.

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

I was recently struck by the fact that one of my puffin images, Puffin IV, had been selected into two different shows by two different groups of jurors for two quite competitive shows. I was a little surprised–I would not have thought, of my various images that have been included in shows in the last year, that it would be this particular image that fared best of the images I submitted.

My surprise, plus a sale or two, led me to “take another look” at the image. As you might expect (it is, after all, Tuesday), composition was at the heart of my surprise. If the main parts of a photograph are subject, light and composition (I think beginning photographers often focus too much on subject)   it’s light on the subject and composition that really tend to pull together an effective photograph. There are far more interesting photographs of mundane subjects in interesting light and/or interesting compositions than the other way around.

There’s no question here that there’s an interesting subject (puffins really are wonderful subjects) and that the light is working as well enough. But neither light nor subject are enough to carry off this image alone. I’ve got hundreds more shots of puffins from the same location, many in similar light, but this one stands out. Why? Those of you who have been reading this column since the beginning will be able to pick out a large number themes I’ve touched on.

The bird is, as a whole, a highlight, so our eye naturally heads there. The bird, as well as some of the grasses and flowers, have high contrast, which pulls the eye there relative to the dark out-of-focus background, where the low contrast keeps our eyes from spending too much time examining. While there isn’t a lot of color in most of the image, the brightest colors pull our eye straight to the puffin’s head. The combination of which direction the puffin is looking, and his placement off-center in the image provide a sense of space and contributes to our sense that we can imagine what the bird is feeling.

Alabama Hills Sunset, Alabama Hills Recreation Area, California.

I’ve probably missed a few more principles that apply, but that list is long enough for me to make my point: While none of those compositional principles by themselves hit me over the head when I look at Puffin IV, the sheer number of them contributing to how I see the image seem to work synergistically.

While an image like Alabama Hills Sunset nearly screams just one or two compositional principles at me, the puffin image achieves whatever strength it has through a chorus of quieter compositional voices that (I believe) harmonize successfully. I think that helped it “sneak by” my attention a bit, I think that’s why I found myself a little bit surprised.

One final word: Puffin IV provides a further example of a point I made last week, that learning these compositional rules is as much a way to build your photographic intuition and vision rather than an algorithm for making a good image.  I’m sure that I didn’t consider all of these principles when I shot Puffin IV. I did think about some things –I knew I wanted some of the few flowers around there on the bird cliffs, and I really liked the idea of using the black volcanic rock cliffs as a backdrop to create tonal contrast. I also knew, I suppose, that I didn’t want the cliff walls in focus; they were messy, with not only birds (which are probably the source of light for the out-of-focus highlights) but numerous streaks of guano.

But, as in many cases, I “followed standard compositional guidelines” without conscious thought, simply by instinct and intuition.

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

Today I’m going to take a brief digression from specific compositional topics, back up, and talk about compositional “rules”.  I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating.

They’re not rules.

Lithodendron Wash Abstract. I didn't shoot this based on "rules", I shot it based on intuition. (Image created as part of the National Park Service Artist-in-Residence Program at Petrified Forest NP.)

By this point in the Tuesday Composition series I’ve written about almost thirty ideas, each of which could be thought of as one (or perhaps a couple of) rules. But using them as rules will, in the end, limit your creative reach as a photographer. I urge you, in fact, I beg you not to use them as rules, either when you create your own images or, just as importantly, you look at an image of another photographer.

Let’s talk about that. It’s easier to begin this discussion by thinking not only about our own work but someone else’s. When I see a new image from a book, an advertisement, whatever, the first thing I do is to look at it, to see it. I do not drag out my list of rules and walk through it adding up a score. Instead, I look, and feel what I feel, notice what I feel. I don’t start with an analytical process, I start with an intuitive, visual process.

Once it’s made an impression, I’ll then try and figure out why. Why does this image seem particularly powerful? Why does this image seem random and uninteresting to me? More often than not (but hardly always!) I’ll be able to put words to at least some of those feelings. I’ll say, “Gee, this feels a little static, I wonder why, oh, it’s a little centered without a reason.” But the feelings come first, the guidelines come second, when I look at images.

At this point, you may be wondering: “Why am I reading this column, then?” How do guidelines help?

Guidelines serve two important purposes.

First, they’re a useful starting point for ideas when you’re strugging to improve an image that just isn’t working. Imagine that you’re working a broad landscape, you look through the viewfinder and go “Gee, that isn’t quite working, I wonder why?” If you’ve spent some time reading about compositional ideas, you might not only be able to figure out what isn’t working (say, a centered horizon), and as a result figure out what to do about it (tilt the camera up and down, see what looks good.)

These guidelines can help you brainstorm ideas for improving your images on-the-fly.

The second reason to read about compositional guidelines is even more important, it builds your intuition. Reading this column is far from the only way to do that, I’d also suggest that you go out and look at lots of photographs. Look at images in books, in magazines, in galleries, on web sites. Look for images that you really love, and try and figure out why you really love them. The guidelines will often help.

This process of looking at images (yours or someone else’s) and putting words and ideas to them helps build your intuiton. It’s a little easier to start with other people’s images. After all, you already know what you were trying to do with an image. Only another viewer will be able to tell you if you’ve successfully communicated with your image to someone else. This is why it’s so helpful to get feedback on your own images from other photographers, workshop leaders, anyone whose photographic “eye” you really respect.

Building intuition is part of building and refining your photographic vision. When your intuition can guide your camera in the right direction, you’ll be able to see and react in the field without a lot of distracting left-brain overthinking, and your images will be stronger and more creative as a result. It may be ironic that this path to intution involves a lot of left-brain thinking and reading, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

No rules, just guidelines, ideas and intuition.

Chiricahua Sunset. The combination of the positioning of the pieces and the positioning of the views (see text) combines to create a sense of movement.

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

So far in this series we’ve discussed images “in the box” of a single rectangular frame. Today, I’ll talk a little about ways to “think outside the box” and use multiple images together as part of a single artwork.

First, a few words of terminology. Diptychs were traditionally any sort of artwork or other object with two plates connected together with a hinge. These days the hinge is optional, and the term is applied to any sort of art in which two pieces are meant to be hung together (usually in a particular arrangement). Triptych refers to the same idea with three images. Polyptych is the general term for two or more pieces. Multiples is sometimes used similarly to polyptych (although the former might be two images printed separately on the same piece of paper). I’m going to stick with “multiples” here as the most inclusive term.

In nearly every multiple, we’re encouraged to consider the relationship between the individual parts of the artwork. The relative placement of the different parts within the artwork is one part of this; if the two halves of a diptych are laid out left to right, we’ll be far more likely to “read” the left image first and the right image second. To the extent that the images combine to tell a story, the left segment of the image will usually tell an earlier part of the story, the right segment the latter part. Not every multiple tells a story (Andy Warhol’s famous silk-screened multiples of Marilyn Monroe don’t seem to really imply a sequence in time), but many do.

Morning Commute, Bosque del Apache NWR. Identical framings and a left-right arrangement suggest a sequence.

Much as the relative position of the different segments of the image are important, so too is the relative position of the segments in the view of what we’re looking at. This is best explained by example. In Morning Commute, Bosque del Apache, the camera was pointed in the same direction for each frame, many of the elements of the two images are identical, only the birds really “move.”  The focus in that diptych is purely on the story, that is, the sequence of events.

On the other hand, in my Chiricahua Sunset diptych, not only is the second panel hung to the right of (after) the first panel, but the second panel also was taken with the camera pointing to the right of where the camera was pointing in the first segment. There is still a sense of sequence here, the right piece does seem to me to come after the first one in time, but there’s also a sense of the relative positioning of the two, even a sense of the camera having moved to the right, as if it were panning. I believe this sense of movement is enhanced by the fact that the two views overlap a bit, I think that dyptychs in which the views of the individual panels just barely avoid overlapping each other often feel more static, perhaps more peaceful, than pieces with overlapping fields of view.

Symmetry is another theme that often comes into play in multiples, particularly diptychs. My Chiricahua piece gets an interesting sense of balance from symmetry, and I think somehow the symmetry of the two pieces (plus the very visible disc of the sun) helps the viewer perceive that the two images are different parts of essentially the same view.

Last but not least, dyptychs often are used to contrast two things, and to talk about  opposition in the ways we discussed last week. The Bosque images contrast a very static moment in time with a very dynamic moment in the same location to tell a very simple story. While I believe both images are effective individually, I think they’re even more effective taken together.

Give diptychs and other multiples a try. They’re fun, and provide an easy and effective way to add movement and interest to your images. (Just as importantly for those of you trying to make a living at photography, they’re often of interest to interior designers and art consultants in a way that individual photographs aren’t.)

Guanaco Anticipating the Future. The contrast between the size and age of the guanaco calls our attention not only to the difference, but also to the relationship between the two.

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

Opposites attract ... our attention.

Opposition is one of the primary themes in photographic composition, one which was first emphasized to me by Frans Lanting, the powerfully talented photographic storyteller. At the simplest level, putting together two areas of different tone (brightness) forms a contrast which pulls our eyes toward the boundary between them. Contrasting opposing colors has a similar effect, attracting our attention and actually enhancing the saturation and power of the individual colors.

But using contrast and opposition in composition goes far beyond that, contrasting concepts can be a very powerful tool for composing a photography to communicate a particular message. Contrasting concepts, much as with contrasting colors, has two effects.

First, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the nature of the contrast. The black and white of a yin-yang symbol draws our attention to tones, the difference between light and dark.  Similarly, a photograph of an infant and an adult leads the viewer to think about age, and as a result, perhaps issues of family relationships and parenting. It’s almost impossible to view Guanaco Anticipating the Future without thinking about the relationship between the two animals (we assume that one is the parent of the other), a concept that wouldn’t come to mind nearly as quickly if I’d only included one animal (or two of the same age and size).

Pink Morning Mists, Torres del Paine.

Second, contrasting two things seems to often exaggerate each of them. If we put a smooth texture next to a rough texture, both the smoothness and the roughness are stronger, more apparent. If we put a moving object (perhaps communicated with motion blur) in an unmoving scene the sense of motion may be enhanced.

In Pink Floating Mists, the glowy, surreal look of the mountains of Torres del Paine is enhanced and highlighted by the sharpness and clarity of the foreground–try covering the bottom of the image with a sheet of paper and see how the image loses “oomph” as a result. In Pond and Drake’s Estero, which I discussed in a previous post about low-contrast images, the sense of how far the estuary is, and how large it is, is emphasized by comparing and contrasting it with the much nearer, much smaller pond. That sense is reinforced by the contrast in contrasts, the pond being high contrast and the estuary being low contrast helps strengthen the opposition between the two.

Pond and Drake's Estero, Point Reyes. Contrasts between near and far, small and large, low and high contrast reinforce each other.

There are dozens (at least) of such oppositions that are handy fodder for photographers. Young and old. Smooth and rough. Fast and slow. Happy and sad. Big and small. Feminine and masculine. Cold and warm. Awake and asleep. Light and dark. Clothed and nude. Ordered and chaotic. Wet and dry. Rich and poor. Tall and wide. Simple and complex. Symmetric and asymmetric. Natural and man-made. Straight and curved. Engaged (with the viewer’s attention, e.g., looking at the camera) and disengaged. Brand-new and decayed. Rich and poor. I’m sure you can think of dozens more–in fact, I invite you to point me to examples of your own work that demonstrate the power of contrasts.

When composing images in a new area, I often look first to see what the most important objects and ideas are before working to include as much of those as possible. But I’ll often also be looking for contrasts which help me guide the viewers’ attention to a concept–because it’s such an effective way of communicating ideas within a photograph.

Rainbow Whirlwind, Seljalandfoss, Iceland. I don't need to show much of the waterfall, or the water at the bottom of the fall, to give you a sense that this is a waterfall--and a very large one at that.

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It is all too easy to forget that when we photograph that we are usually photographing for someone, even if only ourselves. Photography is a type of communication, and the best way to compose a photograph to communicate someone depends on both what you’re trying to communicate and who you are trying to communicate it to. Familiarity is key–if you’re trying to photograph a particular type of animal, if your viewer is likely to be familiar with the animal you’ll want to approach photographing it differently than if they aren’t likely to have seen one before.

It’s helpful to draw an analogy with a dinner party conversation. If you and I are chatting and I start talking about Death Valley, I’ll probably guess that you’ll have heard of Death Valley.  I’ll guess that you’ll know it’s a large desert area in California, that it gets very hot there, and perhaps that it has sand dunes. If I start off the conversation by reiterating a bunch of stuff you already know about Death Valley, you’re going to get bored pretty quickly. On the other hand, if I start talking to you about the Aeolian Buttes, I’m probably going to start with an assumption that you know a little less about it, and start with a more basic information.

Of course, when I’m talking to someone, I have the opportunity to adjust this on the fly, if you say “Oh, I love that part of the Mono Basin”, I can move along. But in photography (and writing as well), I don’t have that flexibility. I have to choose up-front how much to say in my photograph, and how much not to say.

Noa Lake, East Greenland

If I don’t say enough, I may not actually “get across” whatever it is I want to get across. If I really want to show you how cool the oddly pink Noa Lake is in East Greenland is, a little detail of pink water may be aesthetic, that may be a great piece of art, but if I’m trying to tell you about the lake in general I’m going to have to include the whole lake, the surrounding landscape, mountains and lichen. I’m going to have to establish a sense of scale, I’m going to have to use the other parts of the photograph to help you realize that the pink stuff is pink translucent water and not just a trick of the light.

On the other hand, If I say too much, if I “overexplain” something in a photograph by showing you to much of it and/or by emphasizing it, you may not be insulted but you’ll certainly not be particularly interested.

You know what a waterfall looks like. If I photograph a relatively generic waterfall you might find it pleasing but, unless there’s something really more than “Hey, look a waterfall!” that I’m trying to communicate it’s not going to be something that sticks with you. If there is something interesting about the waterfall, like a nice section of rainbow within it, I can really focus in on it, much as I did in Rainbow Whirlwind, and then even a small section of the waterfall will be more than enough for you to understand the idea of a waterfall without me having to include the whole thing.

There are many ways to photographically indicate an object without really “overexplaining” it–you can simply show a fraction of the object, make a silhouette, perhaps obscure part of the object with other objects–in any case avoiding “overexplaining” can be an important tool for simplifying, and improving your images.