Myrtle Beach Photography

Composition

Learn the ROT, then forget it. The infamous Rule Of Thirds is a great way to nudge yourself away from the standard person-standing-in-the-middle or horizon-in-the-middle vacation snapshots. It’s a good last resort if you don’t know how to make a shot look more interesting. But then, please don’t overdo it.

Get closer. Robert Capa said: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, then you aren’t close enough”. Next time you take a picture, try to walk a few steps towards the subject, or even pick out a detail of a scene rather than the whole thing in one. You’ll be surprised.

Use the “sneaker zoom”. Walking closer to a subject instead of zooming in will give you different results in terms of perspective. Try it out.

One subject only. Pictures often work better if there’s a clear subject. Competing subjects are hard to handle.

Un-clutter your images. If there are too many things going on in your image, the viewer can easily get distracted from your subject. If there is too much going on in your picture, see above (”Get closer”, “One subject only”)

Don’t forget about the background. Often you find yourself paying a lot of attention to the subject (the foreground) and completely ignoring the background. The background is as important as the foreground, it is a part of your image. A simple step to the left or right will help you avoid things like branches of trees growing out of your subject’s head.

Change your point of view. Every day we see the world from our own perspective, usually from our own eye level. Change your perspective by shooting from a frog’s perspective or from within a fridge and create an unusual look that people won’t forget.

Moving subjects need space. Your compositions of a car, a bicycle or someone walking will usually look nicer if you give the subject some space in your image to move into.

Use negative space. Negative space is the part of an image that is not your subject. Don’t be afraid to use lots of it every now and then.

Compose buildings straight. Verticals lines in buildings should be vertical on your pictures, or they won’t look natural.

Avoid falling lines. Tilting the camera up when taking pictures of buildings will produce “falling lines”, e.g. the building will look as if its leaning backwards. Sometimes that cannot be avoided. This can usually be fixed in post processing.

Keep water lines horizontal. If you take an image of a lake or the sea, make sure to keep the horizon level. Even a slight skew of half a degree will make the viewer feel uncomfortable with the picture.

Don’t be afraid to cut off stuff. When I was young, I was always told not to cut heads off in pictures. This was simply wrong. Get closer, only shoot part of a face from a person, or select another detail.

Get familiar with design principles. Learn about line, shape and form, texture and so on.

Frame your subject. You can emphasize your subject by placing it into a frame of some sort. Stuff like an open window, tree branches, a doorway.

Be decisive. Either give your subject space to “breathe” (e.g. don’t close in too far with your composition or crop) or close in on some of the details.

If symmetry plays an important part in your composition, take some time to make sure you really are taking your picture from the best spot – dead center in front of a tower or window, for example. Symmetry that is not quite there will bother the viewer a whole lot more than a deliberately asymmetrical image. It saves loads of time in post-processing if you can get this right beforehand; having to tilt and crop your image later could lose valuable elements of the composition and won’t necessarily solve the problem completely.