If you’re an aspiring photographer, one of the things you really need to learn about is photo composition.
Becoming a great photographer will require you to gain lots of technical knowledge about your camera, lighting, and balance. If you don’t have a good eye for composition, however, none of the technical expertise will matter.
In this post, we’re going to give you an introduction to photo composition for beginners. All of the best photos ever taken had great composition, so keep reading to understand how to point and shoot with the best of them.
Table of Contents
What Is Photo Composition?
In its most basic sense, the composition is the structure of a photograph. It’s how you position the camera to arrange all of the elements in a way that communicates your artistic vision.
Photo composition can be altered with a physical movement, a change of a lens, or zooming in and out. The elements of composition are lines, points, and shapes that make up the foreground, mid-ground, and background.
Whether you’re shooting a landscape or you’re doing a portrait and using an app to remove background elements, the composition remains important. To compose a photograph, you need to understand a few key photo composition techniques.
Essential Techniques of Composition
Framing is among the most crucial photography composition techniques for beginners. How your photo is framed depends on what you’re pointing the camera at – what you make the subject of the photo.
A basic tool for framing is the “rule of thirds”, which divides the shot into nine equal squares; three across and three down. Most digital cameras have a setting that brings this grid up for you.
The premise for this rule is that shots are better composed when the subject is placed on one of the lines or where the lines intersect. With negative space taking up the rest of the frame, it’s balanced in an appealing way.
Applying Artistic Vision to Compositional Techniques
Rules like the rule of thirds are helpful when you’re getting started, but they can be broken as well. Applying your artistic vision to the composition of the photograph is what will bring them to the next level.
Your intent as the photographer is the most important thing. Nothing in the composition should appear by accident because you have all the power to make it appear the way you want it to.
Another thing to think about is the balance of the photograph. Putting thought into how much attention each element in the photo is getting will drastically improve your compositional eye. The “visual weight” of the photo should be evenly distributed from left to right.
When you’ve got a crowded shot, you run the risk of having important elements distract from one another. Always try to give your important subjects a lot of room to breathe within the frame, and you’ll have a nicely composed shot.
Take Better Photographs
Now that you know a bit more about photo composition, you can start to take better photographs. There’s a lot of great photo editing software out there, but it all starts with the shot itself, and that starts with composition. Take what you’ve learned here and get shooting. Practice makes perfect!
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