Photography: Exploring Composition

An illustrated guide to improving the composition of your photos and making them more powerful.

Introduction

• Welcome
• Using the exercise files
• Using the challenges

1. The Four Pillars of Composition

• Overview: What makes a successful image?
• Composing for simplicity
• Employing asymmetry
• Including eye lines
• Employing an interesting point of view
• Challenge: Which photo is more effective, and why?
• Solution

2. Composing While You're Shooting

• How to see like your camera does
• Capturing the essence
• Matching orientation to composition
• Separation techniques
• Positioning key elements in the frame
• Working a shot over time
• Making room for type
• Establishing a composition workflow
• Challenge: Compose a landscape for an 8.5x11 magazine cover
• Solution

3. Improving Composition by Cropping

• Cropping for rotation, input and output orientations, and ratios
• Cropping for simplicity
• Cropping for orientation
• Cropping to enhance asymmetry
• Challenge: Crop these photos to improve composition
• Solution

4. Improving Composition Through Image Editing

• Adjusting brightness and contrast to enhance focal points and separation
• Dodging and burning to enhance separation
• Blurring to improve focus on a key image element
• Removing unwanted elements through retouching
• Creating your composite
• Converting to black-and-white

5. Putting It All Together: Critiquing Your Work

• The value of a photo critique
• The critiquing process
• Performing a basic composition critique
• Performing a complete composition critique
• Acting on a critique
• Challenge: Critique this photo
• Solution

Conclusion

• Next steps