The art of composition is full of rules; one of them being, “Don’t ‘bullseye’ your subject in the centre of the frame”.  Overly centered compositions are generally considered static and boring — the “Rule of Thirds” which we all learn early on, is a way to break the static nature of centered compositions.  But, there are times when centering the subject is appropriate and will result in a stronger image.

A centered composition can help to emphasize symmetry, the classic example of which is a forest of fall colours reflected in a mirror-still lake — placing the horizon line of the far shoreline, dividing the top and bottom halves of the image (forest vs. reflection) equally.

Symmetry can be expressed through centering in either the horizontal or the vertical axes of an image.  By centering the subject in the image below, symmetry is implied in the right and left halves of the image below. 

The dominance of a singular subject is emphasized when centered in the frame.  This works well when you want to hold the viewer’s eye on your subject, particularly when there are no other items in the frame that add to your visual story

The subject dominance created by a centered framing choice often works very well in portraits  This is often true with portraits.  This very direct framing choice helps create a sense of connection between the subject and the viewer.

Elements of a circular or radial nature have a natural symmetry of their own, as in the detail of the flower below, and will often work best with a centred approach to framing the image.

A centered subject, even when a small part of the overall composition, can still dominate and also create a sense of scale between the subject and the surrounding environment.  If you want to convey a sense of isolation or emphasize the insignificance of the subject relative to their environment, a central position within the frame will often express this idea well.  

A centered postion within the frame creates a sense of balance owing the symmetry of the composition.  When lines are present that share that symmetry, a centered framing choice becomes even more compelling

Although I prefer to think of it as the “Guideline of Thirds”, rules like the “Rule of Thirds”, have become rules because they generally result in stronger compositions.  But in Art, as in life, rules are sometimes best ignored.  Think about employing the power of a centered composition when next you want to emphasize your subject’s symmetry, dominance or isolation.

Excerpted from my eBook, “Another Twelve Ways to Improve Your Photography”. Available here

(Originally published on BPSOP.com, here)

Photography is a two-dimensional medium desperately trying to represent a three-dimensional world. Without some help from us, it often fails.
We view the world with two eyes rather than one, so a sense of three-dimensional depth is an intrinsic feature of our vision. Not so for our cameras. You simply can’t recreate three dimensions using two, but we can create a sense of that lost dimension, and perhaps suggest a fourth — time…but we’ll leave that for later discussion.
Before we dive in, I need to point out that it is not always necessary to push a sense of three dimensions on a viewer. Compressing a scene with a long telephoto tends to flatten the perspective and may reduce the sense of depth. Shooting with wide apertures will (in some situations) reduce backgrounds to soft out-of-focus blurs, also minimizing any sense of three-dimensional depth. Each approach can be highly effective… it really depends on your aesthetic goals.
Images with a strong sense of depth tend to draw a viewer in — creating a heightened sense of reality; inviting them to explore your image further. So, let’s look at a few ways we can create a sense of depth in a photograph.

Go Wider, Then Get Closer

Use Lines, When They Are Present

Getting close with a wide-angle lens stretches the apparent perspective, making objects close to you appear much larger in relation to those farther away. This stretched perspective contributes to a much greater sense of depth. For this to work, you need to push in close to your subject … really close. A bit of care is required if your subject is of the human species; you will both have to be comfortable with the intimacy this might create. Secondly, lenses shorter than about 35mm on a full-frame camera (23mm for APS-C or “crop frame” sensors) will tend to distort the features of any subject placed near the edge of the frame.
Use Lines When They Are Present
Diagonal lines that recede into the background will become a strong visual pull on the viewer’s eye, greatly enhancing the sense of depth. Altering your point of view can turn even horizontal lines into obliques that will lead the viewer’s eye in the direction you wish it to go… toward your subject for example. Getting low and close with a wide-angle lens created strong converging lines from the art displays along this storefront in Montmartre, Paris

Highlight and Shadow

All other things being equal, we tend to perceive darker areas in an image as farther away then those that are lighter. This is why side light reveals form and texture so well. The darker shadow areas in this side-lit portrait are perceived as being somewhat farther away than the brighter highlights. This creates form and dimension in the face and body.

Take Advantage of Aerial Perspective

Any elements in a rural or urban landscape — a distant series of receding ridges for example, that are viewed through progressively more layers of dust and atmospheric moisture, will appear lighter, lacking in contrast, cooler and more diffuse. The less distinct distant ridges are interpreted by our eye-brain visual system as being more distant. All of which contribute to a greater sense of depth in any landscape where this is found.

Unless you’re a dedicated B&W photographer, colour represents a powerful part of any image you create.  Colour evokes emotional responses in our viewers.  Blue, the colour of the sky and sea can invoke feelings of calm and tranquility, yellow and orange: vitality and happiness.  Red, perhaps the most commanding of our intention often denotes aggression, anger, or violence.  Paradoxically, red can also denote passion and romance (red roses, for example).

Pairings of different colours have different emotional effects as well.  Complementary pairs, those on the opposite sides of the colour wheel reinforce each other; making each appear stronger and more vibrant.  Colours close to each other on the colour wheel form analogous or harmonious pairings that tend to subdue the impact of each other and may often contribute to a calming or soothing effect.  Looking at the pair of images below, which square contains the most vivid and saturated red circle?

It’s a trick question, of course.  The answer is — neither.  In both cases the red circle is exactly the same shade, however the presence of blue, while not its exact complement, is close enough to reinforce the intensity of the red circle.  In the second pairing, the orange background is a pretty good analogous pairing for the red and effectively subdues its impact.

Colour Triads

We can also move beyond thinking about simple pairings of colour and think also about creating colour triads; groupings of three colours that work together.  Complementary pairings reinforce each other, creating a sense of energy and visual tension as one or the other fights for your attention.  A small bit of the complement to the predominant colour in an image will have an almost irresistible draw to your viewer’s eye.  While this can be used to great effect, when overdone it can become visually exhausting. (Sidenote: whenever I show the Red-blue paring in the image above projected on a screen during my live classes, half the group inevitably gasps and turns their eyes away… the combination of these two near complements is just that intense!)  The intensity of these complementary pairings needs resolution in much the same way that a well-crafted chord progression needs to resolve at the end of a song to leave us with a feeling of completeness.  Triadic colour combinations provide this same sense of resolution.

Triadic colour combinations can be created with any three colours chosen from equally spaced points around the colour wheel.  Full disclosure, and so I don’t get “flamed” in the comments, while there are two predominant colour models used to describe colour, each based on a different set of primary colours, I am going to use the Red-Yellow-Blue model rather than the Red-Green-Blue model used to describe digital colour in your camera or computer monitor.   The Subtractive R-Y-B model is commonly understood by painters and is likely the one you learned in grade school art classes.   Using this R-Y-B model to combine yellow and blue paint to create green, makes intuitive sense.  Similarly, combining Yellow and Red to produce Orange just seems to make sense as well.  Using the R-G-B model of digital imaging, combining green and red light to create yellow, is perhaps not as intuitive.  Either model can be used to create colour triads, but since it will be more intuitive to most readers, I am going to use the R-Y-B model here. 

The three primaries of the Red-Yellow-Blue colour model (above left) combine (theoretically) to create every colour in the colour wheel on the right.  Choosing any three equally spaced colours on the wheel creates a colour triad.  Yellow for example, can be used to resolve the tension of the Red-Blue complementary pair from the previous image.   With a little imagination, its easy to see how the triangle in the image above could be rotated around the colour wheel to create an infinite number of possible triad combinations.  Keep in mind that triads are not limited to just combinations of the pure primary colours; we can also create more muted, softer triads by combining equally spaced pastel shades as well.   Red, yellow, and blue form a common triad.  Orange-green-violet is another.  Slight shifts in these basic triads form additional possibilities; red-orange, yellow-green and blue-violet for example.

Psychology of Colour Triads

Psychologically, triadic combinations are dynamic and invigorating by creating visual contrast and harmony at the same time.   They work best when one colour dominates; the remaining two playing the role of accents.  Triadic colour groupings where all three colours are represented equally can be overpowering.  This is particularly so when we combine saturated primary colours; saturated red, yellow and blue for example are often used in children’s toys (think Fisher-Price).  The dominant colour in a triad will largely dictate the emotional impact of the combination.  In a red-yellow-blue combination, if red dominates the triad will create a feeling of energy, passion and love or anger, yellow dominant combinations: warmth and intimacy, blue dominance will create a sense of calm and serenity.

In a photographic image-making sense, it is not necessary for colour triads to be precisely accurate, although the closer they are to the ideal, the stronger will be the effect of the combination. Have another look at the opening image.  The yellow of the window shutter and the warm stone dominates the colour triad formed by the yellow shutter, blue door, and red flowers.  This warm colour dominance creates a sense of warmth and intimacy.  The complement of the blue door creates visual tension, resolved by the red flowers, creating an overall sense of harmony.

Using photoshop to sample the colours in the window shutter we can calculate the “perfect colours” to form a triad with the yellow (below on the right).  The blue and red in the image are not precisely those of the “perfect” triad indicated by the dots on the colour wheel below and the colour patches shown, but they’re close enough.

Where to find colour triads…

Colour triads are not overly common in nature, but they do exist — red and yellow fall leaves against a blue sky for example.   Triads will most often be found where humans have exerted an influence, so urban and some rural settings will be fertile ground to find these colour combinations.  Here are a few more to get you started.  Note that the colour patches and dots on the colour wheel accompanying each image below are sampled from the actual image colours, rather than those of a “perfect” calculated triad based on the dominant colour in each image.

The colours in the image above form an almost perfect triad, based on the position of the sample dots on the colour wheel (the dots are very close to equidistant from each other).  Whether the red or the yellow dominates here is up for debate.  Given its overwhelming power, my vote goes to red.  Combined with the inherent energy in any image panned at a slow shutter speed, the yellow plays its part and adds additional streaks of energy to the image.  Blue completes the triad bring resolution and some harmony

Both images above create variations on the orange-green-violet triad.  In the image of the young girl from Singapore, her skin tone belongs in the warm area of the colour wheel.  While green and violet are merely accents, they are also near complements of each other.  The warmth of here skin tone brings resolution and harmony to antagonistic relationship between the green and violet.

In the last image (right, above) the purplish colour of the grape cluster is clearly dominant, while the warm earth toned background and the green leaves serve as accents.  In each case above the colours forming the triad are not perfectly equidistant around the colour wheel, but they are close enough to create the sense of harmony to what would otherwise simply be pairs of complementary colours. Finding and using triadic colour in your own images can help to create images with the energy and impact of complementary colours, but also with a sense of completeness and harmony.  To most viewers triadic colour schemes will be pleasing and somehow just seem “right”.   Naturally, finding and creating these combinations is done 99.9% in-camera.  However, I am not above subtly tweaking the saturation or even the Hue using the Temperature and Tint sliders in a local adjustment in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw.  I will also admit to occasionally tweaking the Hue slider in a local adjustment as well.  These adjustments will always be subtle since we are always striving for a believable reality.  Sometimes though we need to take the viewer by the hand and lead their eye where we want them to go.  If you would like to continue this conversation on ways to refine and enhance your personal artistic vision, join me in my class, “After the Click”.  Next session starting soon; I hope to see there.

Looking for something that will motivate you to get out shooting? Why not try a Four-Season project? Simply pick a location close enough and accessible throughout the year so that you will be able to get to it at some point during the peak of each season. Pick a location that will highlight the changes in each season…. gardens and parks make good subjects; city skylines perhaps not so much. Many landscape subjects will work well, but here again there should be a significant difference in the landscape from one season the next.

The rest is easy: find a location that works, set up your tripod and shoot. The framing doesn’t have to be exact, but the closer each image is to the other three the better and more impactful will be your series. These can be shot handheld, as was the case with the four images above, but a tripod will make it easier to reproduce the framing from one image to the next. I exported a copy of the first image (winter in my case) to my phone and used it as an aid to find the same (more-or-less) position and framing each time I returned to this park near my home.

As a photo project, this will require a greater commitment than most, but the results are worth it. Aside providing motivation to get out and shoot, the results of a well-executed four-season project will look great printed large and hung in your office, studio, or home. They are also in constant demand at stock agencies and greeting card companies… try searching “four seasons” on the Getty Images web-site. Now is a great time to start a four-season project

Winter is about to breath it’s last gasp, so start now and you won’t have long to wait for your spring image.

Digital imaging has fundamentally changed the way we work as photographers. Digital brings immediacy, flexibility and lowers the on-going cost of creating images: once you own a digital camera, creating thousands of images entails essentially zero incremental cost. For the most part those images live on our hard-drives or somewhere in some cloud. We look at them on our tablets or smartphones, swiping right or left to skim past dozens or hundreds of images in a few minutes. How much thought and consideration can you give to an image you swipe past in a second or two? How easily can you consider your composition, your use of colour or light and shadow when seen for an instant on a 4-inch screen? Printing your work at even modest sizes, holding that print in your hands, allows you to (in fact forces you to) consider your image more thoroughly. You will see things in a printed image that might remain unseen on a smartphone or tablet; you’ll be find yourself asking, “What could I do better?” “How can I improve this image?”

“Printing your work helps you become a better photographer”

Historically, the print has always been the ultimate expression of the photographer’s art. When you print your work, you complete the artistic process by taking control of the final expression of your image. A fine print possesses tactile and aesthetic qualities that you control with decisions in post-processing, image size, paper choice and presentation method. All of these decisions are yours when you print your own work. Consider all the artistic choices you make when you compose and make your image in camera. You choose a shooting position and a point of view. You choose an appropriate aperture, shutter speed and ISO. You choose an appropriate lens and focal length. You control lighting contrast with graduated filters, fill light, reflectors or perhaps you decide to use an HDR approach. Wouldn’t you want to have the same level of control when you create the final expression of your image?

“Printing your work allows you to complete the artistic process by taking control of the final expression of your work”

Admittedly, printing your work involves climbing a learning curve; fortunately, it’s not that steep or long. You will also have to acquire a capable printer, which is not without additional cost. If you are serious about becoming the best photographer you can, once you have a assembled a basic kit, the next purchase you should consider is a printer rather than the latest camera body laden with features you probably aren’t going to use anyway. As for the learning curve, I can help. Head over www.bpsop.com and have a look at my easy two week introduction to printing your work.