# In-Depth Photography Composition Tutorial



## antongorlin (Aug 30, 2018)

This post consolidates all my expertise and skill, and it took me over 6 months to get together. I believe anyone could learn something new from it. There are many articles, but I still decided to create a big composition guide beautifully displayed and easy to follow. I tried to keep it straightforward and brief with loads of materials to download for future use. Also, I keep it as compact as possible for such a significant volume of information. Less noise, more useful info with illustrations, diagrams and charts.






COMPOSITION CONCEPT AND PRINCIPLES
Before going far into the composition building methods, we must realise what the composition truly is, how it is produced, what milestones it has and how it influences our thought.

VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL ALIGNMENT
The general approach is to pick a horizontal frame when the frame dynamic is mostly horizontal and vice versa. In some cases, you could do the reverse to raise tension leaving some breathing space around it.





STORYTELLING USING PHOTOS
Storytelling is the reason of any photo. We want to show what we have seen. If it has nothing to convey, it’s a snap. This entire tutorial is about various means of storytelling. As an example, you start reading a book from the beginning to understand what is it about. It should have a plot, a narrative and a defined structure. It is the same in visual arts. A photo must have a subject, a layout and a context. They form your visual narrative. Therefore, consider composition a storytelling tool.

Please review an illustration below and see how the crop changes the story. Try to decide what’s the idea behind every final picture.






COMPOSITION TECHNIQUES
Let's go deeper and learn some rules and methods that you can execute for immediate results. Some of the ways could seem to oppose each other, but that simply indicates you can’t use them both simultaneously.

I must warn you – none of these methods will transform you into a great photographer. Practice and study will. How long do musicians study? How many out of them become composers? In the modern age of digital cameras and editing tools, one can advance to generate good pics in a year or less. But it doesn’t mean these photos have a good layout. Majority of photographers stop at the Rule of Thirds. It could be enough to do OK images, but there’s a ton of work to master all of them.

LEADING LINES
A leading line makes the observer’s eyes follow it. This line traverses across the image and helps to understand it. There are many ways to create a leading line. The easiest one is to use some solid line, like a wall or a road. Another one is a broken line made of different objects, which imply a connection between them.





DIAGONALS
Building diagonals is simple and straightforward. They are everywhere, always try to add some to the photo. A sparse change of angle converts a horizontal line into a diagonal, and the observer will readily follow it with their eyes.  The diagonals operate best when they commence from the corners.

There are two methods to put diagonals in the picture:





The most common is to draw lines from one corner to another. The other way is to use 45 degrees lines forming a diamond in the middle.

ASCENDING/DESCENDING DIAGONAL
The direction of the diagonal influences how we perceive it. So does the ascending/descending aspect. As we scan the photo left-to-right, we see some diagonals as a challenge to overcome and others as an easy way down.

STORYTELLING EXAMPLE
Let's use the below example to see how we perceive the situation.





It's obvious that just positioning and flipping of the picture gives an entirely different context and tells a different story.

GOLDEN TRIANGLE
Golden triangle is formed by a diagonal line and perpendicular lines to it from other corners.

S-SHAPED CURVE
S-shape is compelling and charming. It smoothly arcs through the picture without any tension. The curve is gentle and catchy rather than straightforward. Such shots look natural, and the spectator has no chances to avoid the flow.






CENTRAL COMPOSITION
Nearly every guide wants you to avoid putting elements in the middle. But that's not right! You surely can build everything around one most important object. Consider this as a more centrist, egoistic strategy. It’s important to have just one hero for this type of frame. It has to be the core of gravity.





Another tale is that you can't put the horizon into the centre. This is correct when foreground and background have an equal weight. You can put it in the middle in many other cases:

1. One part is stronger than the other one.
2. When the horizon is not one of your important lines.
3. Panoramic shots.

RESEMBLANCE
An elegant technique is to discover a resemblance between completely different objects. The key is to see similar forms and emphasise them with the composition. Once you have witnessed similarities, use different composition rules to produce the photo. The likeness could be straight or mirror.





FINAL WORD
This article is merely a part of the full guide found on my site. The entire tutorial contains a lot more examples, recommendations, principles and concepts to consider and has a new chapter not covered here - the Composition Building Blocks. If you liked reading this little excerpt covering 10% of the full article, please navigate to my blog and enjoy the whole thing. The format and size of this post have been approved with the admin.


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## weepete (Aug 30, 2018)

Very good article!


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## Designer (Aug 30, 2018)

Thank you!


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## antongorlin (Sep 2, 2018)

thanks for your feedback!


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## Tim Tucker 2 (Sep 8, 2018)

Very good article.

I like the way you describe composition against the way we order our spaces such as our rooms. I would put more emphasis on that we create the order that allows us to make sense of the space, it doesn't exist naturally. We as humans need to have an ordered understanding, and it's this that we *impose* on our surroundings in order to make sense of them.

I would also include the idea of "compositional climax" as it goes along the same lines of your keeping contrasty objects off the edges. I also note that the second set of diagonals you included, (diagonal method), are based on rabatment.

Further to this the order that we create is very much influenced by our language. It is this language that creates the framework against which we create an ordered understanding, the labels for the boxes in which we fit our surroundings in order to make sense of them.

For a graphic example of this there is the Himba tribe. Their language of colour differs from ours. We understand the spectrum and universally label colour according to hue, the Himba in their language do not. Theirs is more like an artistic understanding and is labeled in perceptual terms of bright/dark, tertiary/vibrant. So show them a series of greens and ask them to point at the odd one out they recognise it straight away, as if it were a blue amongst greens. But such a distinction is difficult for us to the point that many of us can't do it correctly. But reverse this and show them the blue amongst greens and they have as much difficulty as us in distinguishing the odd one out of the greens.

It is interesting because it shows that the way we see is influenced by the language and conventions we use to create an ordered understanding, perception is learnt rather than absolute. It does not exist but is created in our quest to *apply* order to enable us to understand and navigate.

It is also interesting because it raises two more points, that different cultures will have different *rules* of composition simply because their language and the way they label is different. But also that because it is learnt it hints at the biggest trap for photographers:

That what we learn influences what we see and how we understand. In simple terms once we learn a few *rules* we not only look for them but apply them to gain an understanding of the picture. And here lies the danger, that we teach ourselves to see and recognise the very order we seek to impose. We think that because we see it it is absolute and actually there, but it isn't. It's in our minds because *we* learn to see and judge composition by it.

I am also reserved about your leaving colour out of the guide because not only do we always see in colour, (even with a B&W we seek to equate it to our *colour* understanding), but it's the biggest stumbling block I see in many photos. Like the example with the Himba who see differences on brightness clearly but not always hue, we see differences in hue but don't seem to understand perceptual brightness of colour. It leaves the guide concentrating on shape, line and form. A vocabulary of contrast and line and little understanding of colour, which many images on photo forum show clearly. There are also the five perspectives of the Renaissance that rely heavily on an understanding of colour, not only for contrast but plane and depth perception.

Your images show this understanding, but an audience accustomed to dissecting by line does not always see this distinction.

With an appreciation that our understanding is learnt and influenced by the language we use to *create* the ordered space, then an understanding of harmony/dis-harmony can be gained by going with our desire to order or against it. A more abstract take on the "know when to break a rule" concept, but can also include our experience and memory as in presenting images that go with or against what we expect, or are used to seeing. We can use this in composition, not just through line, but colour. Showing both something in line with our experience or something that jars and stands out.


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## dunfly (Oct 30, 2018)

I was reading through your post and thinking, great, but it seems to be missing a lot.  Then I got to the last paragraph and saw that you need to go to your website to get the full article.  Well, it was worth the trip.  The full article is great and well worth the effort.  Goes much more in depth and covers a lot more than the taste you get in the post.  Great work.


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## AlanKlein (Oct 30, 2018)

Tim Tucker 2 said:


> Very good article.
> 
> I like the way you describe composition against the way we order our spaces such as our rooms. I would put more emphasis on that we create the order that allows us to make sense of the space, it doesn't exist naturally. We as humans need to have an ordered understanding, and it's this that we *impose* on our surroundings in order to make sense of them.
> 
> ...


Tim, Since most of us are not Himba, we tend to see aesthetically similarly to our own aesthetics.  Trying to emulate Himba "rules" of aesthetics would only be attractive to the Himba tribe members.  It's like idioms and idiomatic expressions in language.  Fellow citizens understand the idioms but they are lost on foreigners.  How the Himba see does not invalidate how we see or vice versa.


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## SquarePeg (Oct 30, 2018)

I'm glad someone bumped this back onto the main page.  I had bookmarked this to read later and forgot to come back and say thank you!  I found it very useful and have used a couple of the tips already.  Thanks @antongorlin !!


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## Tim Tucker 2 (Oct 31, 2018)

AlanKlein said:


> Tim Tucker 2 said:
> 
> 
> > Very good article.
> ...



Kind of misses the point Alan. Which is that we learn how to see and impose order, the Himba don't readily see the difference between certain different hues at the same luminance not because their eyes are different but because their language is. So it is entirely possible that the way we *learn* composition influences the way we see and understand it. If we attach and learn a significance in The Rule of Thirds than is an image composed because we use it or are we simply recognising an order we impose and teach ourselves to see?

With the article above and the images attached, the first one with the lines, did anybody notice the Renaissance perspectives in that? Light to dark is not measured by right to left but in truth the lighter areas are used to emphasise contrast from foreground to background, contrast and detail recede with distance, classic Renaissance perspective. Warm colour to cooler, classic colour theory. The faces around the table all looking and emphasising movement by accenting that circular motion almost to the point of centrifugal force! The compositional climax in the way the contrast and detail build to a climax around the table and what is going on there. Draw as many lines as you wish but fundamentally nothing much is understood. (_Did anybody notice the balance where the figure leaning towards the front of the frame is countered by the ones pointing into the distance, or the one leaning to the left by the jovial character leaning back to the right? This is common and one of the underlying compositional elements of "The Last Supper"._)

Then when we get to the dramatic view of the clouds and beach, does anybody notice how the removal of classic Renaissance perspectives abstracts and makes ambiguous depth and distance, (_with contrast constant the sea is outlined top and bottom by a black line and makes it stand forward against a beach that seems to recede, I'm not saying this is bad at all but simply observing that the motion implied has nothing to do with the lines drawn on the image_). Does nobody else see how the sea seems to come forward and hover over the beach as it there are three separate layers stacked on top of each other with no relationship really tying them together? Perhaps you see what you teach yourself to see and so become blind to what you don't. Perhaps in that way we are all like the Himba... perhaps we need to see past how we classify and label if we want to understand rather than simply just classify and label...


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## AlanKlein (Oct 31, 2018)

Tim, I don';t know what misses the point.  What's your point?  My point is that different peoples see differently because they're enculturated differently.  Eskimos have dozens of words for types of snow while most of the rest of us just call snow, snow.  Culture effects aesthetics as well.  Since the so-called "rules" follow what the brain finds pleasing, different groups have different aesthetic stimuli that would effect their rules being different than us.  The cultural aesthetics defines the rules.  The rules don;t come first to describe create aesthetics.  

Even layman know when a musician hits the wrong note or key.  The brain is built a certain way.  If a musician writes music that doesn't follow the brain's sensibilities, the listener will turn off.  So the brain defines the rules the musician uses to create music that most would find pleasing to one extent or another.  Of course styles of music is a different subject and we favor certain styles over others.   But the basic rules of music have to be followed to comport to the brain's makeup.


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## Tim Tucker 2 (Oct 31, 2018)

AlanKlein said:


> Even layman know when a musician hits the wrong note or key. The brain is built a certain way. If a musician writes music that doesn't follow the brain's sensibilities, the listener will turn off. So the brain defines the rules the musician uses to create music that most would find pleasing to one extent or another. Of course styles of music is a different subject and we favor certain styles over others. But the basic rules of music have to be followed to comport to the brain's makeup.



Alan, that is so wrong on so many different levels that I don't even know where to begin.


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