Visual Flow: Mastering the Art of Composition with Ian Plant

my name is the implant welcome to my presentation visual flow mastering the art of composition I want to thank you all for coming I've been advised that I've got a very short period of time here so I'm going to dig right into things so let's start out by asking what is composition and at its most basic level composition is a visual structure imposed upon an artistic expression it involves the selection and arrangement of visual elements within a defined space now this may be the technical definition but this really is a very satisfying definition if you ask me so before I proceed ever hear the joke someone holds up a pedo piece of white paper and says this is a picture of a polar bear in a snow storm well this is a picture of two polar bears in a snowstorm I actually when I went to go photograph this the polar bears up in Alaska I was hoping for a snowstorm so I can make a picture just so I can make that joke so I think we can now we can talk about a better definition of composition a better definition for this compositions tell a story about your subject a composition also entices the viewer emotionally and visually into the scene it draws them in to the artistic expression if created in composition allows you to impose your artistic expression your artistic vision on a scene rather than just taking a picture of something composition more than anything invites viewers to see the world through your eyes which is I think very important for everyone as an artist so in this presentation we're going to talk about a few things we're going to discuss several tools of composition I use the word tool instead of rules of composition I get really irked when people use the word rules of composition there's no such thing as the rules of composition there's only different tools that you can use and you can pick and choose which tools are going to work best for any given seeing hopefully I will leave you with a better understanding of some general design principles some general composition principles and hopefully I'm going to help you learn how to make more compelling photographs and this is something I call visual flow which I like to think about composition as standing in a river looking downstream as the water flows past you you want to create that same effect for the viewer you want the viewer to feel like they're immersed in the scene and you want the composition not unlike the water flowing to draw them further and deeper into the scene and I'm going to try to do this without ever mentioning the rule of thirds which by the way is not really a rule first of all and it's kind of made up I think it was Kodak that that invented it in the 30s and it can be a useful rule by show of hands is there anyone here who's never heard of the rule of thirds good I don't have to talk about it so let's dive right in the first tool of composition actually this is my only rule of composition I have one rule of composition and that's simply don't be so literal if you're looking at your scene and you're thinking I'm photographing a bear or a mountain or a person then you're not really thinking about the composition you have to think in the abstract you have to be thinking about your scene in terms of shape in terms of color in terms of line in terms of progression from dark to light or vice versa this is the way you need to think when you're arranging your compositions otherwise it's just going to go right past you think about when you were a kid and you would look up at the clouds and you'd see shapes in the clouds that's what you should be doing as a photographer or seeing the shapes in the clouds or as the case may be if you're in a nice cave somewhere I took this photograph in Iceland and I was attracted to the abstract pattern the colors the shapes the fact that it looked vaguely to me like some reptile some giant dragon that was stirring from sleep and looking at me that's the kind of thing a kid does when they look at the clouds and that's exactly the kind of thing you should be doing as a photographer so let's dive right in the first tool of composition is foreground foreground is important for landscape photography in particular that's that's my area of specialty but I think it's also something that can be very helpful when you're making other two photographs as well so for example this particular photograph was taken in the Patagonia region of Chile and it was a beautiful scene wonderful mountains beautiful sunrise the Sun peeked through a crack in the clouds at sunrise and the whole scene lit up red but for me it wouldn't have been worth taking if it wasn't for the fact that I was able to find an interesting foreground to complement the overall scene so I walked along the shore of this lake for quite some time until I found a little curve in the shoreline that seemed to frame perfectly the reflection of the mountains in the water so foregrounds don't have to be something terribly compelling you're interesting as long as if you think about them in abstract terms in terms of their shape as long as the shape that the foreground creates complements other elements the scene it can be very effective at creating some depth in the photograph and leading the viewers eye into the scene so here's an example that I think is a good example the classic near-far composition and landscape where you get really close with a wide-angle lens to a interesting foreground feature and you juxtapose that with something in the background what's missing from that equation near far is something very important which is the middle ground it's the middle area in between the foreground in the background it's kind of nice to have a visual progression of elements from the bottom of the picture to the top so it's more than just the foreground on the background I think you're more successful if you've got something in between and then maybe something in the sky so you've got a visual progression of three four or maybe five elements going from bottom the top that helps create the illusion of death depth in three dimensions and helps the drop if you were in so for this particular shot I was working with a wide-angle lens of fourteen millimeter lens on a full-frame camera and that's pretty wide and I was scrambling looking for something interesting I had this really great cloud over some boulders in Joshua Tree National Park in California but I didn't really have anything interesting in the foreground and I knew without the foreground the picture wouldn't be quite as effective so when I found this interesting rock formation this little swirl of some sort of rock intrusion into the Granite then I knew I had an interesting foreground so I got in close with wide angle lens often when you're working in near far composition with wide-angle lens you're only a few feet away from your foreground element now if you want to have a lot of sharpness from near to far if you want everything to be rendered completely sharp you often have to stop down to a small aperture f11 or f-16 it's quite common when you're doing this kind of composition but it does help create some depth and it creates a visual relationship between foreground and background when you get in really close to that wide-angle lens it makes the foreground a lot bigger this this rock that I was using as a foreground wasn't that big at all it was very small maybe a few feet in size but by getting really really close with a wide-angle lens that exaggerated the size of the foreground makes it more prominent and makes it compete visually with the background so that gets the eye traveling back and forth between the foreground in the background and that visual relationship ends up being a compelling one so foregrounds don't even have to be something that's actually in you're seeing it can be something that you create so for this shot I created a foreground by by getting into the water of the stream I was waiting in the water up to my waist with a pair of fishing waders that went up to my chest and I used a long exposure to capture the the foam that was in the water that was streaking past me so because I used a three or a four second long exposure that streaking foam created these diagonal lines which lead from foreground into the background and once again we can see that there's some middle ground as well the swirl the water after it goes over the Cascade in the foreground creates a middle ground and then as the stream continues on into the background you can see where I get that idea of visual flow of standing into a stream all these all these diagonal lines that are pushing from the bottom of the image frame into the top and swirling through the composition help draw the viewer and help lead the eye in so you can be very creative with your foregrounds you don't have to be literal at all you don't necessarily have to find something you could be working with moving water or some other element that helps create a compositional line when you use a long exposure and for this particular shot once again I had a pretty sunset I was photographing in Iceland in the winter but I was having a real tough time finding a foreground and finally I found this interesting curving shape in the shoreline and I selected a position to accentuate the shape to make it more interesting so I tried to find the best position possible to make the shape more dynamic and the curve helps frame the scene in the background and helps bring the eye in into the scene so I mean this was just some farmers feel that was back in the same spot a few days later when all the snow had melted and it was a real scrubby patch of marshland not very interesting at all so for a short period of time under the right conditions in the right light with the right angle it was transformed into something that was artistically relevant so you just have to think creatively about your four grounds and not get so hung up on the literal got to think about the shapes and the colors that the foregrounds form and how that relates to your overall scene speaking of shapes this is the next compositional tool I'd like to talk about I've already mentioned that when you're looking at elements of the of the scene you've got to think about the shapes that they form or the shapes that they imply because they don't always make a very distinct shape so for this particular shot which was of a sand dune at sunrise in Death Valley National Park in California the shape was something created by the interaction of light and shadow it was also created by the contrasting color the the golden light of sunrise versus the the deep blue shadows that surrounded it so the shape is is not something that was literal is not something that was a physical shape a physical object it was something that was created briefly by the interaction of color and light and for this particular shot the shape itself became the composition you've often probably often heard that s curves or C curves are very useful compositional elements when you're shooting landscape shots the shape is is really interesting because it does encourage the eye to visit all parts of the composition as the curve winds its way through the through the composition so here I've got the shape going from the lower right up into the upper left part of the image and because it bends and twists along the way the eye is encouraged to visit multiple parts of the composition which is a good thing in this particular shot which was photographed in the Patagonia region of Argentina that's the famous fitzroy there in the background I used the curb I used the shape as a foreground element so the curve itself isn't the focus of the composition the curve is used to lead the eye from foreground into the background where Fitzroy and the other mountains are catching sunrise light so thinking about the shape thinking about how the shape relates with other aspects of the composition is a very useful thing and shapes can also be useful when you're photographing wildlife this particular photographed some sea turtles off the coast of Belize for several days and I found very quickly that sea turtles aren't really that interesting they they really do two things they swim and every now and then they come up for air and that to me was the most interesting thing the thing that a sea turtle would do so I was doing a lot of photography of turtles coming up for air which was kind of funny because I was snorkeling and then they were snorkeling in I got a little confusing for a while but what what you know of all the pictures I've taken of sea turtles this is the only one that I really liked and the reason why I liked it was because it accomplishes compositional shape that the turtle form as it came up to air it was a it was a combination of the pose of the turtle and also my position relative to the turtle but if you squint your eyes you can see that the turtle forms a triangle shape with the long edge long point of the triangle being where its nose is coming above the water now the triangle is a very interesting compositional shape one of the things that the the Masters of the Renaissance learned was something that you've probably heard about called vanishing point which is a perspective trick that they use in their art to imply depth and three dimensions and basically what vanishing point is let's say you're looking down as railroad tracks those two tracks are parallel but they appear to converge in the distance and those two lines coming together in the distance are a really nice perspective cue so it's something the Renaissance painter painters did to make it look like their paintings were three-dimensional but they also did it because they realized that those two converging lines that the human eye likes to follow lines if you think about it if you walk outside and you see someone looking up into the sky what's the first thing you do you look up into the sky you follow that person's line of sight we're kind of psychologically trained to do that sort of thing well when you got two lines coming together that becomes a very powerful compositional point and that's what a triangle is triangle has got three points actually it's got three vanishing points so if you have a general triangle shape to your composition what you've done is you've created a vanishing point where the eye naturally wants to go so in this case that vanishing point happens to be where the the turtles knout is poking above the water which is the most important part of the composition that was thinking about all this when I was photographing the turtle know I was just wondering if any sharks were going to come nearby but but I think that once you think about composition once you study it and learn it more than these lessons become internalized and I might not have been thinking consciously about that but subconsciously I recognized the moment for what it was I knew the compositional shape that was formed I got excited and took the picture here's another example of a combination of shape and foreground so I was attracted this is a scene in Zion National Park in the United States and this particular shot attracted me because of the strong triangle shape that was formed by the rock so you can see there that vanishing point effect where the two edges that come from the right and left corners at the bottom of the image come together that points the eye into the scene it encourages the eye to move deeper into the scene so shape can be very critical to composition now we're going to talk about leading the eye for this particular shot which is an old abandoned building in a ghost town in Namibia in Africa I used leading lines so the lines that are radiating from the corners of the image which was created by the wide angle perspective I used while I was in the hallway photographing the scene that helps those lines help direct the eye deeper into the composition so lines can be very effective at bringing the eye in but there's more than that going on here that to draw the eye into the scene so you don't just need to have a shape like a line or an s-curve that leads the eye in you can draw the eye in through a progression of multiple elements you can draw the eye in also through the transition from light from dark to light or between colors so I use that here for this composition as well there was some sunlight coming in the windows of the Far room and that light was striking the walls and bouncing off the walls onto the back walls that you can see in this photograph so it's actually not directly in the background that's reflected light and as a result the the background those the two openings into the two the two rooms are much brighter and much more colorful relative to their surroundings so that transition from dark to light from cooler tones to warmer tones also helps lead the eye into the scene and the juxtaposition of the two colors of the two rooms the the bright blue on the left and the the bright orange on the right that combination of opposite colors is also very attractive and it helps bring the eye in so if you have something that's relatively bright or relatively relatively colorful the eye is going to be naturally attracted to that area so these are all ways you can trick the viewer into looking at the parts of the scene that you want them to look at this are all ways to create some depth and to get the viewers eye deeper into the picture okay this is some big sand dunes in Namibia and the ripples in the sand are actually quite small but I got very very close with a wide-angle lens to make this photograph and as a result that exaggerated their size and also because of the wide-angle use the wide-angle lens all the the ripples even though they're all parallel they appear to be coming at diagonal angles into the scene at the edges in particular so you've got perspective distortion that is caused by using a wide-angle lens really close to your subject and you also get some edge distortion from the wide-angle lens itself and all these things help create these radiating diagonal lines that go from foreground into the background so they they transport the viewer deeper into the scene here's another example where I didn't use such an obvious line I was photographing in the Virgin River narrows of Zion National Park and here it's a progression of elements water again that that stream analogy the water flowing past me deeper into the scene the long exposure creates blur motion blur in the water and that creates a bunch of little leading lines that help push the eye deeper into the scene so all these things can help get the viewer from foreground into the background so the lines here are not quite as obvious this is a scene from the city of Fez in Morocco and I had this this great alleyway that I saw where there was a little bit of light breaking through that created this this blue frame around the deeper part of the alley so there was this progression dark to light dark to light and then I saw this old man comes ambling through the alley and he had one of the traditional that column Jalla Baz and so I knew he was perfect for the scene he was moving really really slow so I was like all right I can definitely capture him at the best possible moment and and he gets into position he's shuffling slowly into position and then there's a janitor in the background who's cleaning up but I'm like whoa luckily he got out of the way in time and I managed to snap the shot where the where the old man was in the perfect spot so there are some prospective lines here but they're not quite as obvious and I wish I apologize I don't have a laser pointer with me but if you imagine the far part of the alley as being the vanishing point then you see from the the corners of the image you can draw a line into the smaller that blue that section that's that's the blue light that surrounds the deeper part of the of the alleyway if you just draw a line through that point from this from the corner all the way into the middle you get your implied perspective lines and the Renaissance painters would often do this thing they want to always put the lines in obvious they would just they would imply those perspective lines that vanishing point line using a diminishing scale which is a progression of smaller and smaller objects and that can help lead the eye in here so we have this kind of Russian doll effect where you've got the the outer black frame and the little sliver of blue light and then there's another section of black and then the the light in the background and that gets progressively smaller and smaller as it goes deeper to the frame that helps create these implied perspective lines and that progression that layer progression also brings the eye deeper and deeper to the frame and you'll notice still a lot of my compositions I end up putting the important subjects in the middle breaking the the rule of thirds which I promise not to mention but but I do I do like to bring it up in the context of breaking it it's it's not a very it's not a very good rule it can be it can be useful from time to time but it also I think prevents people from doing some some things that otherwise are very good compositionally and one thing that the rule of thirds dislikes is stuff in the center you can do you can put your subject in the center successfully as long you've got some as long as you've got something outside the center to help draw the eye and create a kind of a visual tug-of-war between what's in the center and what's away from the center if you just put your subject in the center with nothing else then you have a pretty boring composition alright so here's a another compositional trick I like to call shooting through something that I enjoy doing especially when I'm photographing wildlife this is a mountain gorillas in Rwanda which is actually a fantastically beautiful country they did have some trouble there about 20 years ago but things are a lot better now and I went photo trekking with the mountain Grylls for a few days and I wanted to create a composition that was a bit more mysterious than just a gorilla sitting out in the jungle eating bamboo shaft so what I did is there was a mountain grill that was on the ground and there was this bush in front of her so I got down right in front of the bush my my knees in the mud and I'm shooting through the leaves to make this photograph and one of the the trackers comes up to me and says no no no no you don't want to be down there there's a better view if you stand up that's like no no no no trust me I know what I'm doing so with this technique I was using a handheld telephoto lens and I was shooting through a small gap in in the leaves and I was very very close with my lens and this actually creates a bit of that foreground effect I was talking about before it creates depth something in between you and your subject helps create depth in a photograph and what I needed to do with the tricky part was I had to find a gap in the leaves through which to photograph the gorillas so the gorilla was moving I was kind of shaking back and forth because it was hard to hold my position and of course it was windy so the leaves were moving so this was a really delicate dance to find that gap so that I could get the eye sharply in focus but shooting through is a really effective technique and I use it with wildlife you can also use it with landscape this is more commonly known as framing so for this particular shot down in Patagonia instead of going for a classic view of fitz roy i-i frame the scene with trees instead and let the trees go dark into silhouette so the interesting frame creates a more compelling composition than if i just photograph the mountain so shooting through something can be can be very effective here's another example with wildlife shooting through in this case some backlit autumn leaves so I have it creates this abstract blur of color and for this particular technique it's important to shoot wide open so I was at f/4 or F 2.8 with with this and the gorilla shot I was shooting with my widest aperture for that particular lens and getting very very close to the foreground screen because that renders them as complete out-of-focus blurs it makes them more abstract it just makes them a wash of color and that's the best way to use this technique when you're shooting wildlife this is a self-portrait I've been most of myself last year on Lake Superior was really cold winter I just moved to Minnesota last year during the worst winter they've had in 25 years it was a great welcome to the area but the cool thing was that Lake Superior pretty much completely froze over and so I went out to the Apostle Islands which are a great place I go there kayaking and they've got these sandstone caves on some of the islands so I hiked out three miles over open ice to reach one of the islands that that's usually pretty hard to get to and I photographed these they call ice caves so for this particular shot I wanted to add some interest so I set up my camera on a tripod inside the ice cave I hit my ten-second timer and then I ran out and did my best to strike a manly and dignified pose now I said I did my best this is as good as it gets and you know I had to work it out a few times but basically what I did is I framed myself with the with the ice cave so I used this technique of shooting through to create a more interesting composition now because I was really close to the icicles with the wide-angle lens that exaggerated their size and because I was farther away I look very small so it makes the ice cave look a lot more threatening and menacing it creates something that's more visually compelling as well so you can use your relative position to your subject to change the size of objects so in this particular instance I made my foreground bigger and made myself in the background look a lot smaller here's another example of shooting through this is a red howler monkey in Peru now I really hope that's not a guy monkey because that's got to be the most uncomfortable way to sit on a tree limb I could ever possibly imagine so I was photographing this let's just assume that this is a female I was photographing her and there was some nice sunset light coming through the jungle but I had these uh these leaves these out-of-focus leaves that were all brightly lit and I couldn't figure out a way to get rid of them and I think that a lot of photographers they live by the the maxim of simplicity they want to simplify all their scenes and I think simplicity is a good thing to learn especially when you're you're first starting out because there's a tendency to include too much include stuff that's not distracting but I think as you get better and better with composition you start thinking more and more about how to make complexity work for you so instead of just finding a position that got rid of all these brightly out-of-focus leaves I tried to figure out a way to use them at compositionally so I created a frame all these brightly lit leaves frame the monkey and help add interest to the the composition so I use this what otherwise would have been a distracting element by shooting through and by finding the right position so that I could frame the monkey with the with the brightly lit leaves I was able to create something that was a bit more visually compelling than it might otherwise have been all right now I'm going to talk about diagonals diagonal lines are very effective remember how I mentioned earlier that curves are good for composition because they encourage the eye to travel throughout more parts of the image frame diagonal lines do the same I think that diagonals are a bit more effective than say like a vertical line or horizontal line with a vertical line that really just trans X the bottom and the top of the image and a horizontal line goes from left to right but a diagonal line goes from top to bottom and from left to right or vice versa so I think it's a bit more interesting it's a bit more compelling so I like to use diagonals they make really effective leading lines so for this particular shot this was in this very dark narrow alley in Morocco I was there with a guide in the city of Fez which is just a walled maze it's pretty impossible to walk around there without a guide because otherwise you just get completely lost in there I said to him take me to like the darkest narrowest scariest part of the town you know I want to go to the place where I'm most likely to get knifed by someone in the shadows he's like I know just the place and it was perfect that you know that I loved working in that environment because when you got so deep into these these really dark alleyways it was very little light coming through so the light that was coming through was very very bold compared to the surrounding shadows so I was able to use that light as a compositional device so the composition is created because of the diagonal line formed by the light striking part of the cobblestone street and everything else being in shadow so once again thinking abstractly about your compositional elements thinking about you know in particular like working with with shadow and light I think that if anything if there's one thing that I it people ask me what is it you're looking for what are you photographing shadows I think would be my answer that's what I'm really looking for is the edge of light because I think that's where you find the most interesting composition is when you start working with the shadows in the light so a diagonal line can can be really effective if you're photographing wildlife or or people I think one thing that can make a portrait liven up is if you have your subject tilt his or her head slightly to the left of the right just creating that little diagonal line makes the composition more interesting of course for this particular shot it doesn't hurt that the polar bear looks like it's charging and about to eat the the photographer I think that helps heighten the interest quite a bit someone asked about the the rule of thirds and this I think this is kind of third --is-- a little bit maybe yeah oh yeah rule of thirds rule of thirds is okay don't get me wrong I actually use it from time to time but I prefer to call it the tool of thirds because it's a tool that comes out when this when it's appropriate for what you're photographing but it can be a very effective tool so diagonal lines are really effective at creating that vanishing point that I was talking about earlier so this is a shot from the rainforest in the Pacific Northwest and what attracted me to this composition was the diagonal lines created by all the ferns converging at this single point so I used a wide-angle lens to get in close to the ferns to exaggerate those diagonal lines to make more prominent in the composition - to change the scale of the foreground relative to the background but it's those diagonal lines coming in and converging on a single point that leads the eye into the scene so diagonals are really powerful tool and you can do a lot of interesting things with them and I've talked already about how diagonal lines coming in from the corners of the image converging into the center or near the center of the image can be a very powerful compositional tool I like to call this the visual vortex because it kind of sucks the eye in when you have all these radiating diagonal lines now it can be a little it can be a little easy sometimes I think there's a tendency for photographers to rely very heavily on diagonal lines like this and you don't really see it as much with painters because painters like to do it more subtly I think it's it's a bit of a compositional crutch for us photographers so I try not to do it too often or - obviously but it is a powerful effect this is one of those sea caves on Lake Superior that I was that I photographed this is in the summer right the kayak this particular Island was about 12 miles from the mainland so I had to kayak out to it and I had to wait several days for the lake to calm down enough to get into the sea cave when you've got even small waves the last place you want to be in is an enclosed stone chamber it can get I mean I've heard of people dying in there a speedboat goes by or something like that a bunch of big waves come in and they get thrown about and they hit the rocks and they get killed so it's it's a something you got to be careful about all right so my next compositional tool something that is called counterpoint and this is really a term that's borrowed from music counterpoint is when the the composer has two different but related themes that are playing at the same time so if you think of any Mozart symphony for example you've always got you know two or three things going on at once two or three different themes and they all work together and this is what counterpoint is now in photography I like to call visual counterpoint the juxtaposition of two or maybe more visual elements what you're trying to do is create multiple points of interest in the photograph so you have two or maybe three different elements that are all competing for the viewers attention and when the eye gets bouncing back and forth between those two elements then the viewer is trapped in the composition and that's how you build interest long-term with a successful composition is is creating that seesaw effect that tug-of-war between more than one element so this is a scene at night from Marrakech in Morocco and I've got basically two primary counterpoint elements here I've got the the waiter on the left with that bright white shirt so he's very prominent remember what I said earlier about something that's bright or something that's colorful is going to attract the eye but then you've got the guy in the center who's the the cook working the grill and he's also wearing white and he's he's bright and so as I was making this scene I had people walking by just hundreds and hundreds of people walking by and I kept taking picture after picture after picture with uh with photography you're not really able to control the elements you kind of have to react to the elements unless of course you're doing a staged or a studio shoot but for this particular scene these were all just random people so I knew what I wanted I knew I wanted to have gaps in the crowd that framed my primary elements so I knew I wanted the cook in the background to be in between a gap in the crowd and I knew I wanted the the waiter on the left to have the same so I kept shooting and shooting and shooting until I had the appropriate gaps in my images now for this particular shot I've got a bit of a third counterpoint element there's a woman in silhouette on the far right and you can see just a little bit of light on her face and one thing you can do when you're processing your images is you can think about composition and you can think about how selective lightening or darkening of an element can make it more visually attractive so when I process this image I just increase the exposure on her face just a little bit to help make it a little bit brighter to make it more noticeable and that makes her the third counterpoint element I didn't want to do it too far it would have gotten pretty obvious and then pulling that much detail out of the shadows would have made her face look really noisy but just just a little extra emphasis you know the back in the darkroom they call it dodging and burning never could figure out which went where but now now we can just call them lightening or darkening much more intuitive but by doing just a little bit of that and it's something the old darkroom masters used to do a lot you could add more visual emphasis to an element or by making it darker you could you could subtract visual way you can make it less noticeable to the eye so these are things to be thinking about when you're processing your images as well this is a very simple example of counterpoint basically I've got the Setting Sun on the left and then I've got the sand blowing off the top of the sand dune on the right and these two elements are really the primary elements these are what attract the eye most so you've got this visual tug-of-war between the sand on the right and the Sun on the left and that's what holds interest in the composition now talking about diagonals earlier I think that when you have your counterpoint elements in a diagonal relationship as opposed to a vertical or a horizontal relationship that makes the composition a little bit more exciting because I think that diagonal line really helps add more interest and get the the viewer looking at different parts of the the image frame so here's a here's a good example of that so my counterpoint elements here are the Setting Sun which is in the upper right portion of the image and then you've got this big bright cacti in the lower left and those are my two counterpoint elements and as you can see they're in a diagonal relationship with each other now this is a this is a classic rule thirds composition by the way so the rule thirds can be can be useful but this is also an example of what I talked about earlier with foreground getting very very close with a wide-angle lens to make your foreground look more prominent in fact the cactus looks bigger than the mountains in the background and that's that's something that's useful as well by making the background recede in size you create that that that reduction in scale that I talked about earlier and that helps create these implied perspective lines that that vanishing point effect this is something that you would see in the the great works of the Renaissance all the time so thinking about all these compositional tools I know it's a lot but that you know the more you practice the more you work with it the more intuitive it becomes the more a lot you can see a lot of these tools coming together so here's another example of counterpoint it's a little bit different from the other ones this is a scene from Namibia they've got these giant thousand foot red sand dunes it's a pretty cool place so I had this really interesting curving shape which was formed by the interaction of shadow and light on the dune crest but just taking a picture of that one element that that one shape I didn't really think it would be all that interesting so what I did is I found a position where I had this this brightly lit tree in the the foreground and I added that as my visual counterpoint so now the scene is about two elements as opposed to just one so I increase the complexity by adding something else to the composition so I've got the curving shape and then the tree and the to visually relate to each other I tried different variations like putting the tree off the center where the where the line from the dune crest comes down but the best one was where the where the two interacted and intersected with each other so it's important to think about your your counterpoint elements but it's also important to think about how they relate to one another now we're going to talk about something I like to call visual anchors so when you're working with a really complex and chaotic scene as I said earlier a lot of photographers like to simplify the scene which i think is a good strategy but I think it's also important to learn how to work with complex chaotic scenes and I'll point out that when you look at the some of the great paintings of history you usually see more of the the latter than the former you don't see painters simplifying their compositions you see them working with a lot of multiple elements a lot of complexity and richness in their compositions I think if you really want to learn composition you should study the great works of the painters because they can they would spend you know a year or two doing their masterpiece and they could do anything they wanted with the composition so they created these really rich complex compositions when they were painting now photographers it's harder for us to do that especially if we're reacting to a fleeting moment but we can use a lot of the same tools and techniques that that the painters used and as long as you recognize the moment when it happens you can see the world as complex and chaotic as it is suddenly come together for a brief moment in form something that is coherent visually and something that's meaningful artistically and this is what Cartier Bresson would call the decisive moment it's that moment where he would recognize that the world briefly made sense in an artistic way and that's when he would snap the shutter so that's the same idea that I'm talking about here a visual anchor is a really bright bold prominent shape or or physical object or element of your scene that helps reduce the chaos that attracts the eye so this is a very chaotic scene from Marrakech in Morocco at night the visual anchor is the old woman wearing the orange robe who's begging in the square so you know I knew that that she was going to be eye-catching she's bright she's wearing something that's very colorful I know that's going to trap the eye so what I just needed to do when I was when I was taking these shots was to make sure that that she didn't have any visual clutter around her I needed a gap in the crowd so that she would shine through and she would be my visual anchor so despite all the complexity and the chaos going on everywhere else the eye automatically goes to her and there's other parts of the scene that attract the eye the viewer in a strong composition is going to want to explore the composition the visual anchor always brings the eye back to the starting point so you create this endless loop basically where the eye travels through the composition studying everything and then goes back to the visual anchor and starts all over again so that's the idea behind the visual anchor this is a very simple example of a visual linker and landscape your foreground in landscape is more often than not the visual anchor for your scene that's part of the reason why you want to have an attractive foreground so this is a scene from the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina I found this what looked like a river of grass all this long grass that was flowing into the background and so it's very chaotic you've got literally thousands and thousands of all these little little lines going throughout the scene so I found this random plant to be my visual anchor it's my foreground in and of itself it's not very interesting but it's just a compositional tool it's just something to attract the eye it's got a defined shape it's relatively bright so as the eye goes through the scene and is enticed away by all the chaos the visual anchor brings the the eye back same thing with this shot of flamingos in Namibia the visual anchor is the wonderful mango that's looking up that actually you can see its head so I had to wait for quite some time to they were all sleeping for that to happen so the visual anchor is just that one obvious focal point that the eye is always going to ah now we're going to talk about patterns and I'm going to speed things up because I realize I'm running out of time so for this particular shot once again the sand dunes in Namibia I was attracted to the pattern formed by these dead trees patterns are something you should always be looking for so patterns can be a repetition of shapes patterns can also be the juxtaposition of opposing elements in a repetitive fashion repetitive fashion so here we've got orange and purple starfish that create a bit of a pattern that leads the eye to the image then you've got the the blue water around them that it's a complementary color to the orange so that creates another set of visual opposition that's repeated throughout the image so patterns can be very effective sometimes the pattern can emerge from only three elements I guess I guess a pattern is three or more if you want to think about it that way and the pattern can be your visual anchor that cuts through the chaos so this is a shot of Cape fur seals took this in Africa and I had three seals that were looking up and so they they stood out the pattern of the three of them helped distract from the visual chaos that is a cape for a seal colony when you get ten thousand seals in one place it not only visually chaotic but it's also the smelliest thing you can possibly imagine awful awful smell another compositional trick I like to use shooting into the Sun and this isn't our shot from Namibia got a lot of maybe Oh shots here it's a really fantastic place to photograph and for this shot I shot into the Sun your mother always said don't look into the Sun and that's pretty good advice but if you're a photographer you're going to be breaking your mother's heart quite a bit because you can do some really interesting things when you shoot into the Sun so for this shot I the Sun was just rising over the top of the dune that was in the background so I selected a composition that had didn't have the Sun in it but had the glare from the Sun coming down into the top of the composition and that creates this eye catching halo effect behind the dead tree so I used a combination of things I've got the leading lines formed by the shadows of the tree as my foreground bringing the eye in and then the eye is attracted to the tree to the top of the tree because of that bright white halo effect so shooting the Sun can be can be really useful in landscape here's a really literal example of using the Sun as a compositional element when you're shooting with a wide-angle lens using a small aperture you get a starburst effect or some people call call it a Sun star which i think is a bit redundant but that's just you know being overly critical so the starburst effect is really eye-catching and it's something that is best achieved with a wide-angle lens usually with a small aperture like f11 f-16 you can also include the Sun with wildlife I wouldn't recommend pointing a telephoto lens at the Sun when it's high in the sky because it will burn through the the mirror and the sensor and in a few seconds it acts like a giant magnifying glass but when the sun's low on the horizon it's a lot less intense I like when I'm shooting wildlife to include the Sun as a visual element I think it just makes the image more interesting here's another example it's a lighthouse on Lake Superior where I not only did i frame the subject using this old driftwood but I also included the the Setting Sun in the image frame and in the in the composition so you can see multiple techniques coming together I'm going to talk about reflections reflections are real interesting way of creating bold compelling compositions this particular shot is really about the cognitive dissonance between the reflection and the scene that you see so there were you can't really see them but there were three elephants walking past the waterhole at sunset and the light was behind them so when I shot this they're rendered in silhouette so you can't see the elephants all you can see is the reflection so the reflection itself really became a composition some reflection shots can be straightforward depending on your angle of view here's an example of near perfect reflection so I did a 50/50 split between the bird and it's mirror image reflection but if you change your angle of view the reflection changes and sometimes you can get results that don't really match up with with the reality of the scene so this doesn't look like a mirror image I've got all these egrets here and I every time I show this picture I always get someone asking me you know how'd you photoshop that because the because the bird the reflection of the birds doesn't seem to match the birds above them but if you if you look at it actually you can see where each bird is matched by by each reflection is matched by an actual bird so by changing your position relative to your subject and the reflection you can you can alter the reality instead of going for that mirror image you can go for something that's a bit more abstract now when I'm shooting reflections I'll sometimes do like a 50/50 split and go for symmetry but I've often found that the best way to shoot reflections is to find some element that introduces some asymmetry into the image so I'm always looking for a way to break up that symmetry I like to have a combination of the two things I think that actually the most effective compositions are on one hand very balanced and symmetrical but on the other hand they've got something that breaks the balance breaks the symmetry and that introduces some energy into the composition this is known as artist call it I sorry I'm blanking for a moment here but basically the idea is that you want to find a way to create harmony and energy at the same time so so finding a way to break up symmetry is a good way of doing it so for this shot I had the the mirror symmetry between the the mountain and the background and it's reflection on the foreground I use this little piece of driftwood to break up the symmetry to be my foreground to be my visual anchor to be all these things that I've talked about that helps create a more interesting composition as a result now finally once again you don't have to think literally about this reflections can be thought of in an abstract way so there there are some real reflections in this scene which is a scene from Patagonia and Chile and this is a storm that was building up at sunset there are some reflections of the color in the water but the reflection that I'm really focused on here is the implied reflection the mirror image that's created by relating the shape and the clouds and the shape of the wave that's coming in on the shore so it's not really a reflection but as you can see there's this this curving shape to the clouds and I waited for a wave to come in to create to fill in the space to create that same shape but flit in the foreground so the foreground has got the mirror image shape of the sky above it so I use this concept of reflections but in a non literal way in an abstract way which as I said before is what I think is the key to really understanding composition so I'm at the end here just a few reminders about composition a snapshot shows the world what your camera sees but when you create a successful composition you show the world what you see and that's why I think composition is so important it's your way of imposing your artistic vision on the scene so it's not just a snapshot and the final thing to remember about composition I encourage everyone to study photographic composition composition of the great painters really think critically about it when you see something ask yourself why do I like this why don't I like it think objectively and critically about it and if you can see it if you can see what some master painter has done and you could say aha I recognized what what he or she is doing I can understand the compositional tricks they were using to make this work if you can see it nothing can see can stop you from doing it may take some practice it takes a while to really develop these skills and to start seeing the world as as you need to when you're making a composition seeing things in terms of shape and line in color but once you can see it then nothing will stop you from doing it thank you very much whether you're a hobbyist or a professional bnh has the answers to your questions experience a world of technology at our New York City superstore connect with us online or give us a call our staff of experts is happy to help

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 372,583

Keywords: optic 2015, b and h, BH Photo Video, B&H, ian plant, b&h, bh photo, bhvideos, BH Photo

Id: qxGwNVNrB64

Length: 51min 46sec (3106 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/W00ster]

I watched this one the other day and found it entertaining and informative. Well worth the time!