Composition for the Average Person.

Whether you are looking for a good family photo, just found something interesting, or perhaps are a budding photographer looking to improve your skills, the one thing that will set you apart the most from the average person holding a camera is composition.

Composition is a pretty vague term, but in its essence it means how the subject of your picture is defined and framed. Good composition shows a clear subject in an interesting way. Bad composition makes it hard to tell what the subject is, and makes the picture boring to look at. So how do you get from bad to good compositions in your pictures?

Let’s look at this first example of bad composition.

This is a pretty boring picture. I walked outside, and took a quick snapshot of the mess left by my children. There’s no clear subject being shown (is it the playhouse, or the tricycle?), and it’s pretty bland to look at in general.

So, how do we improve from here? The first step is to look for an interesting background. While there may not be much around, it doesn’t take much to be better than a cement pad and lawn that needs mowing.

You may also want to consider changing your perspective. The only change for this next picture is the angle. Instead of shooting from eye-level, the camera was set on the ground.

This is better than the initial snapshot, but the background is still pretty cluttered (and not very interesting). It is better than the eye-level, plain photo. Still, while the shift in perspective may be enough for family events and holidays, it isn’t enough to make an ordinary scene (like this one) very interesting.

So what next?

First, the background is too cluttered. There is just too much behind what’s supposed to be the focus of the picture. It doesn’t help that the subject isn’t the most interesting.

Speaking of which, what is the subject? Separating the subject from the extra stuff around it can be a great way to highlight what you want. For the next picture, I chose to highlight the tricycle.

Already there is a massive improvement. Just by shooting from a different angle to get rid of the cluttered background, and focusing on a single subject, the picture goes from the boring clutter left around by kids to a photograph that highlights the abandonment of an old toy.

Ok, so there’s a bit more that goes into it, such as the lines from the shadow and where the concrete slabs meet, horizon, and exact framing, but I’ll get to that type of stuff in another post. Even without any complex techniques, shifting the focus to a single subject and highlighting it can make an otherwise boring scene something worth looking at. Add in a bit of editing (for the photographers out there), and you get a decent image out of an ordinary subject! And that is the power of composition.