So many cool conversations with people since the last issue about awards, how they feel about them, and lots of advice given to me about what I should do. The thinking seems to range from one extreme of researching the tastes of every judge to the other extreme of ‘f&%k awards they are BULLSH anyway’.
I’ve decided to enter this year, as I had planned, but really stop overthinking it and just enter stuff I like regardless of whether it fits that particular award brand or is within the tastes of that round’s judges. Let’s see how it goes.
I fully think the hardest thing of all to master in photography is composition.
Light is easy as it’s fairly textbook and it’s maths and science and stuff.
Moment is fairly easy because we have 20fps shutters and mahoosive memory cards and, well, cool stuff happens at weddings. Point your machine gun camera at it and brrrrrrrapppp.
Composition though. That’s the enigma. That’s the bull that is hardest to tame.
Composition is probably the thing I work hardest on these days and I think it’s fairly simple to nail some basics, so I’m sharing my composition basics with you today.
Yes. Our job is making sure we capture those all important moments, and sometimes that means grab shots. And oftentimes we don’t have time to think about composition when the grab shots happen.
But I don’t personally think we can use this as an excuse for poor composition a lot of the time.
It’s like a sandwich.
Composition is the bread. It’s the structure.
The moment is the filling. It’s the reason you’re eating the sandwich.
Light is the special sauce, in my opinion. It’s what made you buy that sandwich from that shop.
A sandwich without bread isn’t a sandwich. A moment without good composition isn’t a great photo. I think too many awards are won where the moment is great but the composition is non existent and that’s led to a slow puncture in the composition tyre of the photography car.
One analogy too far?
A great story has a great beginning, middle, and end.
Equally, a great photo has a great amount of attention paid to the foreground and background and not just the subject or moment.
The easiest change you can make to improve your composition is to pay much greater attention to the backgrounds of your photos.
Composition has to be a conscious decision. And for me it begins with knowing and consciously choosing my background before the moments start happening in any given situation.
Is there a fire exit sign, fire extinguishier or some other monstrosity? Is the doorway ugly or is there a bottle of water or something else distracting in the background that I can move? Can I shoot in a different angle that’s just going to look better?
Do I really want to shoot towards that DJ booth and his beautiful eyesores of massive black speakers during the party?
Do I prefer the guests in the background or a wall?
Pay far greater attention to your background and you’ll spend far less time banging your head on the desk while editing.
Yes, the new mask tools in Lightroom are wonderful. I’d rather not need them!
When I shot Canon 5d3 I had it set to use 9 focus points because they were the strongest and quickest 9 and the 4 corners were my most used.
Now I have Sony A73 I use the screen as a touch pad and whether I’m looking through the viewfinder or the LCD I use my thumb to constantly move the focus point around.
I also have the tic tac toe grid (rule of thirds) on my screen and in my viewfinder so I’m often picking a focus point at one of the intersections.
In my opinion, taking your focal point away from the centre instantly improves how interesting your compositions are.
There are two final simple ways you can make your composition better.
One is to add breathing space to your images. This means not zooming in as far, or stepping further away if you’re on primes to ensure you’re not chopping stuff off that you don’t want to chop off and you’ve got the room to crop in Lightroom to achieve your final composition.
The second is to remove breathing space from your images. Get closer to the moments, effectively cut out the background either literally by filling the frame with your subjects or using the depth of field to reduce the background to a blurry mush.
Technically this isn’t a compositional technique but it will mean bad backgrounds aren’t destroying good grab-shot moments.
Cameras are so quick, memory cards are so big, AI can take care of your culling and editing.
The industry has also changed to a point (thanks mainly to the rise and rise and rise of documentary style wedding photography) where we believe we aren’t allowed to miss a single thing that happens.
So we run around like headless chickens trying to capture everything that moves, everyone that smiles, every kid being a kid, every granny falling asleep, every reaction to every speech, everything.
This isn’t a basis for good quality, consistent photography or storytelling. Not just that but it’s absolutely exhausting physically and mentally.
Pick your battles, get your background ducks in a row, play tic tac toe with your focus and you’ll see instantaneous and fulfilling changes to your work.
Thanks for reading!
Adam
