Combine a setting or rising sun, a shoreline, and a few kids, and you have the makings of a terrific shot. You won’t have to work hard to keep it simple, and well designed.
This photograph of hay bales on a North Dakota farm is more about a "mood" than it is about any tangible subject. Yet, even when viewed small, it does evoke the feeling of a quiet morning on a farm.
Who can resist a baby? Photographers have known for ages that when shooting people, one should always focus on the eyes. It is through our eyes that humans communicate with one another. Combine a cute baby with a direct look in the eyes and you have a winning image.
The Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Canada provide the perfect backdrop for a serene moon shot. The ultra-calm waters made the reflective image even more perfect.
Of all the midway rides, the Ferris wheel is most picturesque. In the right light, a shot of the infamous wheel takes on an ethereal feel, and the memories of awe-filled rides fill your mind.
Taking it Further
The Finnish digital media instructor Antti Lehtinen has a very nice website with a number of tutorials on it. Many of these are geared toward the novice and are easy to read, well thought out, and do a nice job of summarizing some of the traditional teachings on photographic composition. Visit www.secondpicture.com/index.html.
Additionally, I highly recommend another website purely for the purpose of looking at examples of incredibly simple but amazing photographs. Richard Hamilton Smith, a long-standing commercial photographer from Minnesota, has a beautiful selection of his commercial, personal and stock images in his web portfolios. He has taken photographs all over the world, using a documentary style and recording what he sees with a captivating sense of image design. Go to www.richardhamiltonsmith.com.
Chapter 4
Composition:
Getting it Right
Believe me, you’ll have a much easier time accomplishing this part of the process than we did before Adobe Photoshop existed. The main subject of the image still needs to be identified and presented with clarity – that hasn’t changed. However, placing that subject against an uncluttered background is a whole lot easier if you know how to use Adobe Photoshop to clean up distracting, unwanted elements.
But let’s start with the subject. It would be easy for me to tell you to move in close on the subject and place it just off-center, but I don’t think that’s very good advice. I think there are too many elegant, effective ways of treating the subject of the photograph to distill it to only a couple of rules. There are just too many exceptions, like patterns, negative space, and what I call “letting it breathe.” Don’t limit yourself to one way of thinking.
Patterns. To start off, let’s look at some examples of pattern images, starting with a graduation ceremony. This photo of a commencement ceremony at a university is a perfect example of a pattern. It’s extremely simple: a sea of graduates in cap and gown. This shot works well at any size. Even at an inch or two square, you can easily see that these are graduates at commencement. The messages conveyed are graduation, advancement, accomplishment, big events, life, gathering, etc.
At larger sizes your eye moves all around the image, searching out the small details and differences in caps, gowns, hair, etc. It also lends itself well to cropping, since changing the height to width ratio has no real effect on the message or the mood of the image.
Here’s another example.
Here we see the stripes of a zebra, another great pattern familiar to people all over the world. Again, even when used at a very small size, you instantly know what it is. It can be cropped to any size or shape and it still holds up well. The message has some versatility to it: zebra, Africa, wildlife, earn-your-stripes, black and white, and on and on. This image has been on file at Getty Images under the PhotoDisc collection since 1998 and has sold over 200 times, earning almost $3000.
As we’ve seen, patterns that you come across in everyday life can make superb stock images. You just need to keep your eyes open and let the possibilities reveal themselves. These examples are all very simple compositions, and they have all sold extensively over the years. Once again, and I really don’t want to sound like a broken record, but simplicity equals sales.
Finally, here’s one more pattern example. This outdoor crowd scene, another people shot, is fairly difficult to get because you need many hundreds of people massed together in order to pull it off. I saw a large crowd at the Minnesota State Fair one year, and knew that the scene would repeat itself at this same location in subsequent years when there were heavy crowds at the fair and it was late afternoon. Sure enough, the next year I showed up at the Minnesota State Fair when all of the circumstances were in place, and there was the shot. It was done with a 300mm f2.8 lens for very shallow depth of field. The result is that almost everyone is out of focus, except for a small strip across the center. These are real people, but since no faces are truly recognizable, no model releases are needed. In just three years at iStockphoto, it has sold well over 300 times. It's a solid money maker, and a great example of a found image that's a strong visual metaphor for humanity, crowding, community, and similar concepts.
Let it Breathe. When I say, "let it breathe," I'm referring to the opposite of the old stock photography rule of "get in tight." I find that many compositions suffer from claustrophobia if you move in too close. Besides, the good folks who design all those ads need somewhere to put all of their advertising copy, and I want to emphasize the idea that ad copy has to go somewhere. It is very important to the designer to be able to drop in some text if it is a necessary part of the design. If you come in too close to your subject and crop tightly around it, you leave no space for any copy.
Now let me explain what I mean by letting an image breathe. I find that backing off from the subject just a bit further, beyond just leaving a little room for copy, allows your eye to wander and dance around in the space surrounding the subject. This generally only works with photographs having strong depth of field and, because of the properties of optics, that implies that you are more likely to have significant depth of field if the image was shot with a wide angle lens. Your brain won't have any fun bopping around an image space if it's all out of focus!