I’m so excited to have Kelly from Daphne Photo Studio doing a guest post on composition and cropping. Kelly is a good friend of ours and she is among those I respect most with a camera in her hands. She’s been nice enough to agree to talk about what makes an image stand out via creative crops and composition. Thanks Kelly! – Ryan

When Ryan asked me to do a guest post for his photo class series, I jumped on the opportunity to talk about composition and cropping. I spent four years in college earning my BFA in photography, so I think my background in art has definitely helped me grasp the importance of good composition. Now that I have started my photography business, I am constantly challenging myself to come up with new and interesting compositions so my work can stand out among all of the millions of professional photographers in the world today.

In my opinion, composition is one of the strongest elements of any piece of art (not just photographs), yet it can also be one of the most commonly overlooked aspects that goes into taking a picture. I think the natural tendency is to want to capture a scene as we see it, but often times the way our human eyes see it is not the most interesting. By composing the scene with our cameras (or by post production cropping) to highlight certain areas of interest, our pictures automatically become more pleasing to our eyes and make a more powerful impact on other viewers. The way we compose our photographs can prompt our viewers to imagine the rest of the scene and that in turn will invoke a certain emotion in them. That is the ultimate goal – to engage our viewers with interesting compositions!

You may have heard of these before, but I will touch on a few pretty common “composition rules”…

The Rule of Thirds

This is probably the most common and most popular composition rule out there. Basically the rule of thirds says to imagine that your picture is divided into nine equal segments by two vertical and two horizontal lines. By placing your subjects or most important elements along these lines or where they intersect, you add interest to your photo. To put it simply, don’t always place the people or objects you are photographing in the center of your picture.

This rule works especially well when taking landscape photos. If you want to emphasize land or water, place your horizon line 2/3 up from the bottom. If you want to emphasize the sky, place your horizon line 1/3 up from the bottom like this:

Some digital cameras even have the option to superimpose a grid over the LCD screen to help you visualize this rule, so you may want to check your camera and see if you have this option.

The following are a few other “rules” that can make a picture more powerful and engaging.

Viewpoint

Try taking a picture from a different viewpoint than you normally would and see what happens.

Depth of Field

Ryan touched on depth of field when he talked about aperture, and although it is easy to see in pictures, it is somewhat hard to explain. To give you an explanation I turned to Wikipedia and I like the definition they gave: “Depth of field is determined by the subject distance (that is, the distance to the plane that is perfectly in focus)”.

Photographs are 2-dimensional, so it is important to create depth to guide the viewer into the scene (which was obviously 3-dimesional). This can be done with a slightly wider depth of field as seen in the first picture or an extremely shallow depth of field as seen in the second picture.

Framing

When you hear the word frame, most people think of a wooden or metal square with some glass that protects your picture and hangs on the wall. Have you ever thought of using architectural elements or other things in nature to frame your subjects?

Background

I cannot stress enough how important it is to pay attention to the background when photographing your subject. So many people take pictures with trees or poles growing out of their subject’s head or place their subject in front of a busy background that is totally distracting to the viewer. If you want your subject to be the main focus of your photograph, then make sure the background helps to emphasize your subject rather than detract from it.

Cropping

Cropping is probably the easiest way to instantly make a so-so composition into a masterpiece. And one important thing to remember is that cropping can be done AFTER you take the photo. Do not hesitate to take a picture that does not look perfect to you at first because you can always crop it using photo editing software later. A lot of times I will take several versions of the same picture at different focal lengths and angles because I know I am going to crop it later and I would rather have a bunch of options to work with rather than just one.

When trying to think of how you want to crop a picture, it might be helpful to think of the intended use or purpose of the picture. For instance, I knew that I had a square frame that I wanted to use for the dandelion picture on the left, so I played around with a couple versions of a square crop in photoshop and settled on the one on the right.

Here are a few other examples of how cropping to highlight a certain point of interest can be very effective:

The best advice I have is just to experiment! Art is extremely subjective and the more you practice and experiment, the better you will become at creating interesting compositions and developing your own style. Good luck!

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