What Makes You Smile?

Take a minute, and think about what makes you smile. Now, we are going to capture that person, thing, or idea in the best possible way by learning about various composition "rules" to elevate our photos to the next level.

There are no rules in photography. You can shoot whatever you want, however you want, whenever you want. With that said, there are certain set-ups that tend to help highlight our subject and, overall, create a more visually appealing image. Remember though, rules are made to be broken in photography so feel free to throw them out the window as needed.

Rule of Thirds

This is the most popular composition rule. Basically, images are often more appealing when your subject is NOT in the center of your frame, but instead, the left or right third of the frame, or the top or bottom third of the frame. Pretend that you drew a tic-tac-toe board on your phone screen as you take a picture. Try to place your subject where one of the intersecting lines would be (when you take photographs of people, the subject is usually their eyes, so you'd place their eyes at an intersection). Take a few photos where your subject is in the middle of the frame, then use the rule of thirds and compare them to the originals. What do you think?

Symmetry

Look for opportunities to capture symmetry in your photos. Often, photos involving symmetry look great centered! See... rules are meant to be broken! One of the easiest ways to capture symmetry is with reflections. If you have a lake or pond nearby, see if you can capture a tree and its reflection in the water. Be careful with your composition, with symmetry, you want to be extra careful with placement, make sure everything lines up, minimize distractions, and create a sense of evenness. What makes symmetry so great? Our eyes are naturally drawn to "perfection".

Frame Within a Frame

In the same way that symmetry is appealing to the eye, having your subject in a "frame" is also appealing to the eye because it tells the eye directly where to find the subject and brings them there immediately. This could mean having a subject lean on a doorway, where the doorway frames them, taking a photo out of a window where you're standing far enough back to capture some of the window in the frame, tree branches that appear to "hug" a house, or shooting through the leaves.

Leading Lines

Leading lines are exactly what they sound like - lines or paths in a photo that direct the viewer right to the subject. In addition to helping a viewer navigate your photo, leading lines also create a sense of depth, moving a 2-D image closer to a 3-D perspective. This could mean a picture of a child standing on a windy path. Enough of the path needs to be included in the photo to give a sense of traveling along it. Another example would be a dog on a bridge - the bridge appears wider at the beginning and then narrows as we move over it in an image. Place the dog at a spot where the bridge starts to converge and the lines of the bridge lead us to the dog.

Rule of Odds

Simple - an odd amount of items is more pleasing to the eye than an even amount of images; three is the most appealing number of items to combine. Why? When we have two items, our mind automatically combines them as a pair, so we technically see "one" item. When we add a third, we automatically focus on that third item which makes the image more exciting to the brain. Be careful though - having too many items makes us look at the items as a group and is not as appealing. So, how many items work well together for photography? Try 1, 2, 3, or 5. Once you start moving beyond these amounts, the composition is just not as strong and there are other methods we can use to make our photo more attractive. If you have four children, should you leave one of them out of the photo? Probably not, but I'll leave that up to you!

Fill the Frame

All too often, when someone takes a photograph, a person is off in the distance and there is a bunch of "clutter" in the frame distracting from the image. We try to get the entire person or subject into the frame. Sometimes this works, but sometimes it doesn't. Try filling your frame with your subject, so that there is little, if any, background left in your photo. For example, a photo of a person's eyes, where the background is part of their face, but nothing else, or a building, where you see just a large section of that building and either nothing else or just a small glimpse of the sky. Depending on your scene, the opposite can also work well (Using Negative Space). In this scenario, we would use something simple as a background for our subject. For example, a statue with a backdrop of a blue sky.

There are many, many more composition rules, and I encourage you to look into them if you're looking for ways to take more interesting photographs. Remember that photography is subjective. Capture your images in the way that is most appealing to you, but never hesitate to experiment - in this digital age, we can delete all the photos that we deem "failures".