Composing Pictures: Important Tips for Composing the Perfect Photo
Learning how to properly compose pictures can mean the difference between great looking pictures and bad ones. This article will help give you some tips to improve your photo composition and take great digital pictures.
Filling the Frame & Clearing Clutter
Although there are exceptions to this rule, usually filling the frame is one of the simplest things you can do to improve your composition.
Often times, people try to squeeze too much in the picture and end up with a picture that has a cluttered background and turns out uninteresting.
For example, if you are taking a picture of your child playing on a swing, you should fill the frame of you child on the swing and leave out the swingset and other background clutter like Uncle Ed tending to the barbeque.
If you don’t fill the frame with just your child, you will lose them in the background and won’t be able to capture their excited expression from swinging high in the air. You can always take a different picture of Uncle Ed flipping burgers so you can capture just him in the picture.
The great thing about digital cameras is that you can see the picture in playback mode to make sure it looks okay. Then if something you hadn’t noticed before is there, like a stray piece of litter on the ground you can re-shoot the picture.
Sometimes leaving lots of empty space in the photo also works well. You may want to fill two thirds of the picture of something like a sandy beach to get a special effect. Just be sure to get a close enough shot that your subject fills at least about a third of the frame. And that brings us to another important tip for taking digital pictures.
Rule of Thirds Technique
Most pictures have the subject directly centered in the picture with a lot of empty space (or clutter) around them. This happens because most people use digital compacts in autofocus mode and these cameras usually have a center-weighted focus.
Professionally taken photographs rarely have the subject in the center because they use manual focus (we’ll look at a trick that digital compact users can sometimes use). If you have a DSLR you can also use this trick too.
One of the most popular composition techniques is the “Rule of Thirds”. With this method, the photographer imagines six evenly spaced lines breaking the image into nine even parts. If you want to see gridlines in your preview screen, there are some cameras that have grid lines superimposed over your image to make it easy for using the rule of thirds.
Using this grid in preview mode – or your imagination – you can frame the composition so that the subject (whether an individual, group or object) is on one of the lines of the grid. And you don’t need to line this up exactly. With a little practice, using the rule of thirds will become second nature.
Focus on Focusing
So, it’s time to talk about how to get your subject in focus without placing them directly in the center of your picture. This technique works great for subjects that are not moving, like people sitting down or a picture of a statue or tree. Here is how you do it:
- Move your subject in the middle of the frame where your viewfinder’s focus point is in the center and press the shutter release button half way down.
- Wait for the green light to glow steadily signifying your focus is locked.
- Keeping your finger pressed on the shutter release button so it stays pressed half way down, move the camera until you have the composition you want.
- Now, hold the camera steady and press the shutter the rest of the way down.
- Always wait for the green light because that is the camera’s signal that it has taken the picture.
Extra Composition Tips for Taking Great Pictures
Focus on something specific on your subject. For example, with people and animals, this is usually the eyes because they are so expressive.
To make photos pop, develop a photographer’s eye for contrast. The brighter the brights and the darker the darks, the better the contrast. Another way to make your picture pop is by framing your photo properly. Make sure to choose a picture frame that highlights your picture instead of competing with it. You can do this by using matted picture frames or simple metal or wood gallery picture frames.
Too add interest to a set of photos of a given subject, take photos from different angles. Stand on a chair or lie on the floor. Don’t always take your pictures from the same vantage point.
By using these tips, you’ll be able to compose great pictures and display them on your wall for all to enjoy.
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Filed under Amateur Photographer, Photography by JamesJ
