Have you ever looked at a photo or a painting and thought that it just looks…right? It’s probably because of the composition. Rendered down to its simplest form, a photograph is a combination of two things. The elements that are included in, and the light captured by a given photo. The things that are included and where you as the photographer place them in the image make up what is called composition. Composition and light are the two things that will move your vacation photos from average to very good. We’ll talk about the light part another day.

I doubt that any one photographic topic has been written about more than composition. I just Googled “photographic composition” and got 840,000,000 results in 0.55 seconds so there must be something to this! As you look into the topic, you will find an endless number of rules, guidelines and tips…enough to cause your head to swim right past the topic, which would be unfortunate so how about if I just cover enough to get you started?

First, what are you trying to capture? The idea is to take a photo that shows a main point; someone’s face, a waterfall or an interesting building for example. Next, where in the frame should that main point appear? Put another way, if you were to show the photo to someone, what is it you want them to look at and where would you want them to find it in the photo? A well composed picture should make these two points self-evident.

As mentioned above, there are a great number of “rules” of composition. Most will help you create a good, well-balanced photograph but for our purposes, let’s stick with the four most obvious ones as a starting point. Learn these and you will be well on your way.

Rule of Thirds

To start off, I am a little uncomfortable with the use of the word “rule”. That implies that you have to follow this to the letter and you don’t so please don’t take the word “rule” too literally. A suggestion of thirds might be a better term.

Imagine the scene you want to photograph being divided up into nine sections, Think about a tic-tac-toe game. Under the rule of thirds, you want to put the main element of your photo at one of those spots where the lines intersect.

You’ll see in the following two photos I have divided them into 9 sections…

Another use for the rule of thirds could be when deciding where to put a horizon line in an image. Imagine a seascape scene. You would try to place the horizon line either along the bottom third line or the top third line depending on what you were trying to show. A gorgeous sunset would be best shown with the horizon line on the bottom third. Waves crashing over rocks in the foreground? The horizon line might be placed along the top third.

Fortunately, modern cameras (and smart phone cameras) allow you to show the rule of thirds grid right on the viewfinder to assist you in composing. On my Samsung, in the “settings” section of my camera, I can turn on “grid lines” and the tic-tac-toe grid appears on the screen.

Leading Lines

In this, you find a linear element that leads the eye into the scene. It might be a road, a river, a path or some other feature that works its way, usually from the front of the scene, to the back. Here are a couple of examples:

In each of these, your eye is drawn into the scene by a leading line. On the left, the country road disappears into the distance. On the right, the natural line between the rows of trees carries your eye naturally into the picture.

In the photo on the right, the shoreline serves as a leading line. The eye follows the curve of the shore around the point and up to the lighthouse.

Fill the Frame

Just as it sounds, you want to cover as much of the image with the subject as possible. This is useful when you want to concentrate on the detail of the key element. A building with interesting architectural features, a flower or group of flowers or, with care, a person’s face might be images where you would want to fill the frame.

In both of the flower photos above, I completely covered the image. On the left, I wanted to circle the center of the flower with the surrounding petals to act as a frame. On the right, the center of the flower is magnified through a dewdrop, but the flower itself is in the background so that viewers could understand what they are looking at as well as to provide a frame.

Rule of Space

Rule of space is a compositional idea that you want your subject to be positioned in the frame so the subject has room to move or has room to see. For example, a person walking from left to right should be placed on the left third (approximately) of the frame so that they have room to walk into the scene. A flower that is facing up to the sun should be placed on the lower part of the frame so it has room to look up towards the source of light. I always think of the rule of space as being a partner to the rule of thirds because if you leave space for the main element to have room to move into the scene, you will often apply the rule of thirds to achieve that.

Above, the lovely lady is looking towards the morning sun which is coming from the right as we look at the image. Placing her on the left side allows her more room to look to the rising sun. This combines both rule of space and rule of thirds.

This little guy is flying toward the bottom left so by placing him in the top right, he has more space to move and the sense of motion is increased. If he were on the left of the image, there would be a feeling of him running out of room.

I hope you have seen that the use of some simple compositional principles can help you create photographs that are well-balanced, have greater eye-appeal and tell the story you intended to tell. I highly suggest practicing these ideas and am sure you will see improvement in the quality of your photos. As mentioned above, you can not run out of information to read and study on the topic or composition. I have only listed four here but you can read on about the use of symmetry, the use of textures and patterns, arches and triangles and framing just to name a few. If you are interested in further reading on composition, I highly recommend this book by Bryan Peterson. Besides being a great read on the subject, it is filled with beautiful and compelling images.