“If you never try, you’ll never know” .. Cold Play
A recent run of weather has worked over the backcountry, sending water down arroyos that have been dry for months, rearranging the regolith. The loose mantle of rock and soil shifts, roads are cut, and the landscape, for a time, is made new again. Up high, the aspens are beginning their annual transaction, trading chlorophyll for gold, and down here in the valley the summer’s accumulated heat is slowly migrating out of the rock. You can feel it in the evenings.
The days, meanwhile, have become a litany of what must get done, a list perpetually backfilled by the fine-grained sediment of the day-to-day. In the midst of this, I find a certain enjoyment in returning to the principles of photographic composition, a kind of structured musing. There has always been, for me, a truth in the idea that the surest way to learn something is to prepare to teach it. The exercise forces a clarity, a distillation. It has also sent me down a path of considering my own technique against what are held up as the rules of composition. Not that I operate in defiance of them. As with any practiced craft, the rules don't so much dictate the outcome as inform the workflow. They are the accumulated wisdom against which you test your own eye.
To be your own worst critic is, I suppose, an unlisted but essential part of that workflow. I can look at an image captured and edited a year ago and see only its deficiencies, its failure to communicate. It feels inert. Then I pull up the original RAW file—the flat, uninflected data from the sensor—and remember the distance traveled in post-production, the quiet labor of turning the photograph into what I was seeing, and not necessarily what the camera gave me.
My memory works that way, seeking a certain fidelity to the moment. You pull a black-and-white print from decades ago, and the day it was made comes rushing back, the memory filling in the color, the temperature, the sound—all of the attendant verisimilitude the flat paper could never hold on its own.
Geologic Interlude: Before I begin a review of photographic composition techniques, I'd like to share a New website that has been published. This is an incredibly valuable resource for someone like me, and it aligns with my work here. Its value in general is literally priceless. This is an interactive geologic map, the Cooperative National Geologic Map. This is a product of the United States Geological Survey, USGS, and the American Association of State Geologists, AASG. With this I can zoom into any spot in the continental United States and see the geologic unit at that spot. There are many layers of information, beyond the stratigraphy, available for analysis. This is a treasure. Take a look, and you’ll learn a lot of geology just by interacting with the map. Good stuff! Have a look
=================
.jpg) |
| Clouds and Cows |
To speak of photographic composition is to speak of a language, one that arranges the world within a four-sided frame. At its most fundamental level, it is, as one has said, the “arrangement of elements within a photo to create the desired effect.” But to leave it there is to describe a hammer by only its weight and dimensions. The essence of the thing is in its purpose, which is not merely to make an image “look pleasant” or “good,” but to build a connection. Robert Rodriguez Jr., a photographer who spends a great deal of time thinking about this, puts it plainly: if the composition is careless, the picture will “fail to resonate with the viewer.” It will be a collection of objects, but it will not be a statement.
The discussion often begins with the so-called rules, though they are better understood as creative suggestions, a set of foundational grammars from which one can build. The most famous of these is the Rule of Thirds, a simple tic-tac-toe grid laid over the frame. The theory holds that our eyes are drawn to the intersections of these lines, and placing a subject there lends a natural balance. Sean Gallagher, who has made his living framing the world for National Geographic, confirms its utility. It’s a starting point, a way to avoid the static, bullseye obviousness of dead-centering everything. But it is no guarantee. You can follow the rule and be left with a composition thrown off balance by a vast and meaningless void.
From this basic grid, the language expands. You learn to see leading lines in a curving road or a fence line, guiding the eye into the scene and creating a sense of travel. You find a frame within a frame in a stone arch or a stand of trees, a device that adds depth and isolates your subject from the visual noise of the world. One technique suggests you fill the frame, getting so close to a subject that all distraction is eliminated, creating an intimate connection. Its direct opposite advises using negative space, leaving vast empty areas to give a subject breathing room, to emphasize its solitude against an empty sky. None of these are laws; they are strategies, conscious decisions made in service of an idea.
As the grammar becomes second nature, one begins to explore a more nuanced syntax. You start to understand the inherent energy of a diagonal line, the way it creates a “dynamic composition and tension” that a horizontal placidity lacks. You see the world in terms of patterns—the repeating texture of rock, the ordered ranks of aspens—and you understand the electric effect of breaking that pattern with a single, dissident element. You begin to feel what is called visual weight, the intuitive sense that a dark, heavy object feels unnatural when placed at the top of a frame, creating a subtle unease in the viewer. You might even find your compositions aligning with the mathematical elegance of a Golden Spiral, though as many photographers admit, this is more often discovered in hindsight than constructed by design. It is the result of a practiced eye arriving at a solution that feels correct, a solution that happens to echo a fundamental principle of aesthetics.
The art itself, however, resides less in the catalog of techniques than in the photographer’s process—the quiet work that happens before the shutter is ever pressed and long after the image is captured. It begins with an intentional decision to slow down, to survey a scene and conduct what one photographer calls a “mental inventory” of what you find compelling. What is it here that you love? That question, and its answer, provides the pieces of the puzzle. From there, you move your feet. A small shift in position can straighten a crooked line, separate a tree from a mountain, or reveal a foreground of immense interest. You become vigilant about the edges of your frame, knowing that a stray branch or a clipped object can pull the eye away from your intended focus.
You wait for what is called the decisive moment—the instant a flock of birds enters the frame, or a ray of light breaks through the clouds. This is the culmination of preparation and patience. And the work is still not done. In post-production, a crop can distill the image to its strongest form; a distracting element can be removed. The goal, through it all, is intent. It is the effort to turn the raw data from a sensor into the feeling you had standing in that place at that time. It is a process of learning to see, of developing a visual literacy so deep that it becomes intuition. You are no longer just following rules; you are composing for what matters.
Composition, then, is an act of translation. It endeavors to communicate not only the particulars of what you see, but the internal resonance you feel from having seen it.
These thoughts are distilled from my own field notes on composition, which I have since formatted and, in a concession to the modern workflow, passed through an artificial intelligence for the sake of clarity. For those interested in a more granular treatment of the subject, a comprehensive PDF of these notes is available. A comment below with your email will find its way to me.
Thanks for stopping by for a read.
No comments:
Post a Comment