Demystifying Composition

excerpt from Natural Design: Image Design for Nature Photographers

Composition refers to the structure and organization of the elements within the four edges of a photograph. The arrangement of these elements is called the composition. ‘It is a clean composition.’ ‘It is a busy composition.’ ‘It is a striking composition.’ Regardless of the adjective, every image, unless it’s an image of nothing, has a composition.

We’ve all heard the word composition before: It’s the stuff that makes up the thing. For example, for a soda it’s the water, natural juices, carbonation and chemicals and for an article it is the structure and order of the sentences and paragraphs. For a photograph, it’s all the little things (be them tangible or intangible) inside the frame, including the frame itself, that make up the whole, complete image. In the field when we try different angles and distances we are composing the image: selecting what we want and eliminating undesirable elements.

The building blocks of the composition, referred to as components or elements are things like shape, form, line and point. These are the tangibles.

There are also intangibles which play an equally significant role in image making. Things like color, light, mood, tones, harmony, contrast, balance, space, weight, and time-of-day all work with the tangible elements in the scene and contribute to the final image.

So we have the tangibles and the intangibles. All these elements must be composed by the artist to make a single photograph and it’s not at all easy. We must take a scene in nature and put it onto a very small piece of photographic media. To raise our images above the level of snapshot and demand more than what Program Mode creates for us, we must use every available tool to our advantage and that includes functionality provided from the camera, elements in the scene and from the artist within. We learn to communicate without words.

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excerpt from Natural Design: Image Design for Nature Photographers, Available Now!

Revised June 23, 2008
Text and images copyright Gloria Hopkins