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Photographic Composition, Part 2

Foreground, Rule of Thirds, Balance, Image Depth, Image Frames, Shooting Moving Water, Color

Photographic composition is what makes great pictures out of mediocre pictures

This is part two of a two part article on composition. Go to part one.

The use of foreground is a very important composition technique. It is something that I use constantly in my landscapes. Foreground is that area in the picture that is from quite close up to perhaps four or five feet from the camera. To be effective, foreground usually must be very close--one to three feet from the lens. Wildflowers are a foreground I use a lot. For flowers to really work as foreground they need to be quite close to the lens, as close as the lens will allow. This means, of course, that you must use a very long depth of field if both the foreground and the background is to be in focus. I discuss how to get a very long depth of field while keeping both the foreground and the background sharp in my article on depth of field. If you don't know how to do this, be sure to check this article out. Keeping both the close foreground and the distant background in sharp focus is absolutely critical to making good landscape photographs.

Occasionally the photographer comes upon a whole field of wildflowers--acres and acres of gorgeous reds and yellows and blues and pinks and whites. The temptation is to get it all in the picture. Forget it. This never works. The whole field is too big. If you try to get it all using a wide angle lens, you end up with teeny wienie little flowers too small to even see. The right way to take this picture is to select the best bunch of flowers in the field, get as close to them as possible and use them as foreground. The rest of the field then becomes middle ground and background. The corollary to this rule is that it is not even necessary to find a whole sea of flowers in the first place. Just one small, magnificent bunch will do. Get good and close to the one lonesome bunch, and they are better than a whole sea of flowers. You can do the same thing with reflections in a lake. A whole lake isn't necessary for a good reflection shot; if you get close enough, a small pond or even a puddle will fill the picture and work just as well as a whole huge lake.

Lots of other stuff also works well as foreground for landscapes: old gnarled logs or stumps, a big rock with colorful lichens, dried grasses. Almost anything is better than nothing, even a nondescript bush is better than no foreground at all. One on the best foregrounds is water. Lakes are great. They often have wonderful reflections of the sky or mountains. Using lakes as foreground serves another purpose; they're great for simplifying the scene. They eliminate all that attention grabbing clutter and often provide simple, strong lines for organizing a picture.

Moving water also works well as foreground. When you shoot moving water there are two choices. First, you can freeze the water in place by shooting at a very fast shutter speed like 1/250 or 1/500 or more. This results in a shot where every drop and sparkle and rivulet of water stands out sharply and clearly. Wildlife photographers use this technique in the classic shot of the black bear catching the jumping salmon in mid air. Most landscape photographers use a second way to shoot moving water. They shoot very, very slowly--perhaps a one, or two, or three second exposure. The slow exposure blurs the water. This is the way I like to shoot moving water. The results can be quite beautiful. The water looks like steam or liquid mist as it pours over rocks and down cascades. One plus to shooting at a slow speed is that slow speeds mean very small F./stops and this in turn means large depths of field. In fact if you plan on using moving water as close foreground, and still keep the background sharp it becomes necessary to blur the water.

When shooting moving water, occasionally the scene is so bright that the exposure meter won't let you shoot slow enough to blur it. There is so much light that you have to shoot fast to get the exposure right. One solution is to put a polarizing filter on the lens. This will lower the light by as much as two stops. Other solutions are to use slower film or neutral density filters which help lower the intensity of the light. In these days of digital cameras, it is also easy to use your slowest ISO speed to help you shoot more slowly.

Foregrounds can also be frames. A frame is anything in the scene that can be used to enclose the main image on any of its sides. One of the best frames is overhanging tree branches. It's amazing how much this simple technique can improve a picture. Generally, frames are used to set off mountains, or lakes or other background subjects. You can make the tree branch frame either a black silhouette or give it color and detail by altering the exposure. If the branch is considerably darker than the background, it's best to just turn it into a totally black silhouette. This keeps the picture simple and also makes the exposure of the main subject much easier. If the sun is coming over your shoulder, the branch will usually be quite bright. In this case, the branch and the background will be about the same brightness and both can be exposed to reveal color and detail.

I often use foreground to provide the main color of the picture. Backgrounds are usually not very colorful. Distant mountains, for instance are often a dull, lifeless blue or purple. Without a colorful foreground, the picture would be pretty blah. Wildflowers, lichens on a rock, bright new spring leaves, an autumn oak bush or a colorful aspen branch all make great foregrounds that provide brilliant colors.

Foregrounds are usually shot with a wide angle lens. This works best if the background is not particularly good but the foreground is. With a wide angle, the background will fade into the distance, become very small, and merely provide backdrop for the foreground which then becomes the main subject. You can also do the opposite: emphasize the background, and still have some foreground. This works well when the background is the real subject, a dramatic mountain spire, for instance. To emphasize the background, move twenty of thirty feet back from the foreground and put on a long lens. If you are back far enough, you can still include the foreground but now the background will be sucked in to become bigger and more dramatic while the foreground becomes less dominant. Be careful of your depth of field though. Longer lens have a much shorter depth of field than a wide angle. It is very easy to blur either the foreground or background or even both. I hate to think about how many times I have done just this and ruined the picture. When using a long lens, remember to use a small f-stop to increase the depth of field; small f-stops increase depth of field for long lenses just like they do for wide angle lenses.

Don't underestimate the power of using foreground. It should be one of the main things you look for when scouting for good picture spots. That wonderfully scenic mountain range will look pretty ordinary until a nice foreground is set in front of it.

Another very handy rule of composition is the rule of thirds. To use this rule, divide the picture into thirds both horizontally and vertically. Do this by drawing two equally spaced horizontal lines and two equally spaced vertical lines. Now, use these imaginary lines to help compose the picture. For instance, when a picture has a horizon line, as most landscapes do, don't place the horizon line in the middle of the picture dividing it exactly in half. You can place the horizon line 2/3 of the way up leaving 1/3 sky and 2/3 ground. Or, you can place the horizon 1/3 of the way up leaving 2/3 sky and 1/3 ground. If you choose mostly sky, then sky is what is emphasized. Do this when there is a great sunset or wonderful clouds, in other words, when the sky is the real subject of the picture. Another example is a picture of a mountain reflected in a lake; don't divide the picture into two equal parts, one part real mountain and the other part reflected mountain. Use the rule of thirds instead.

Here is another way to use the rule. Look at the picture as it is divided by the imaginary lines of the rule of thirds. The points where the lines cross are known as sweet spots. If you have a lone pine, or a large boulder, or a bunch of colorful flowers, or any other dominant subject, place them at a sweet spot and see how much better the picture looks. Another way of thinking about the rule of thirds is to remember the rule, never center anything, either vertically or horizontally. This is a very important rule. Centering anything in a picture rarely works. Important objects should always be placed a little off center, generally at the sweet spots where the lines intersect. I tend to use the lower left sweet spot a lot. The possible exception of this rule is when there is one very large object that almost fills the entire picture. Sometimes it works best to center this kind of subject.

A corollary of never centering anything is the rule of balance. Even though nothing should be exactly centered, a picture should also feel balanced when you look at it. It shouldn't feel as if it is tipping over to one side or the other. Avoid putting a large mass of anything over to one side and nothing on the other. I once ruined a great shot of a wonderful mountain valley full of wildflowers this way. I composed the picture with a huge mountain ridge running diagonally down from the top right to the bottom center of the picture. The huge ridge filled the whole right side of the picture. The picture was way to heavy on the ridge side. No matter how I cropped the picture during printing nothing helped. I finally had to toss it out.

This ruined picture illustrates one of the problems of following rules of composition too religiously. There is a composition rule that says that diagonal lines can add a lot of power to a picture and that you should try to use them. I got so involved with trying to use the diagonal line of the descending ridge as artistically as possible that I forgot the feel of the whole picture. I got a great diagonal line into the picture, but ruined the picture in the process.

Sometimes it's far better to just go with your instincts and pay attention to how the picture feels and forget the rules. As a matter of fact, the best way for me to deal with the rule of thirds, the rule of centering, and the rule of balance is to try and feel them. I don't try to use these rules literally; in fact, I more or less forget about them when I'm shooting. Instead, I keep them in the back of my mind and fiddle around with the picture until it feels right. When it's right, I know it. When it's not right, something feels wrong about the picture, it just isn't right. The ability to do this comes with experience. Listen to your inner guide to rightness. It usually knows more about composing a picture than your outer, rational mind. And, it sometimes means breaking the rules. If it feels better to break the rules than to rigidly adhere to them, then by all means break them. The bottom line is that the picture has to feel right.

Good pictures often have a lot of depth. When you look at this kind of a picture they seem to be three dimensional. It's almost as if one could step right into them and disappear into the background. There are lots of little tricks for creating depth in a picture. The simplest technique is to remember to use foreground as we have already discussed. Another major technique is using converging lines. If you look down a railroad track you see a classic example of converging lines as the rails converge from six feet apart to a single dot in the far distance. The same thing happens with roads and rivers and fence lines. This is a technique that all artists, not just photographers, have used for hundreds of years to create an illusion of depth.

The use of objects of diminishing size also helps create a feeling of depth. In landscapes, this works particularly well since there are lots of objects that are about the same size in actuality but that look smaller and smaller as they recede into the distance. Trees work very well. It is easy to compose a picture with huge trees directly in front of the lens and smaller trees in the middle ground and tiny trees in the background. Ditto with rocks in a river; as the banks of the river converge, the rocks in the water get smaller and smaller. When it is possible to combine two elements of perspective like this, the effect is much greater.

Another way to create depth is to look for objects that overlap. The classic example here is a whole series of hills or mountains that overlap as they recede into the distance. Usually there is another perspective control in operation here also. As the hills recede more and more into the distance they get lighter and lighter. This works really well if it is sunset or dawn and the hills are a nice pink or purple or mauve color.

A final way to create depth is to look for S curves receding into the distance. In landscape photography, S curves are usually found in rivers or roads. One classic example is Ansel Adam's shot of the Tetons with the S curve of the Snake River in the foreground. Roads, trails, lines of trees and mountain ridges also form S curves

Hopefully these two articles on composition were helpful to you. You won't remember every thing about composition at once, so concentrate on just one of two at a time. Probably the most important composition rules are simplicity, fill the frame and use foreground. This is a good place to begin. I would be interested in knowing if these two articles were helpful to you. Send me an E-mail and let me know.

Fred Hanselmann
2-21-07