Composition in Landscape Photography -
Pleasing the Viewer's Eye
By: Andrea Ghilardelli
 Beautiful
subjects and technical ability are not enough to
make a good picture. Photographers must properly
compose the photo, too. Composition should be
pleasing and harmonious; it should help driving the
viewer's eye through our picture as we desire.
Elements to consider for an attractive composition
are dominant feature, balance and rhythm.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A composition
looking harmonious to a person might look lackluster
to another. So feel free to adapt the suggestions in
this article to your needs and attitudes. Besides,
try your best not to be stuck into rules and
commandments, because they might be the loss of your
creativity. Remember: photography is the art of
seeing, not the skill of following the rules. Seeing
things differently might convey different composing,
which is good, because original and personal.
Experiment with your creativity and inspiration; try
breaking purposely the rules. This means that
occasionally you will have to throw away a few shots
and this is good, too. Indeed, if you have seldom
some shots to dismiss, it means you are not
experimenting enough. Having said that, let us list
a few concepts we should refine our sensitivity for.
Main Subject
It should be self-evident that before shooting we
should know exactly what our main subject is. We
must do our best to convey the viewer's attention to
it, without distracting elements. This does not mean
that we must exclude everything except the dominant
feature in our image. In fact, we have three
options:
 1)
Macro-photography. Show only the main subject
and nothing else. This yields the advantage of no
distractions to the viewer.
2) Intimate landscape. Show the main subject
together with its neighborhoods to give it a spatial
placing. This can be useful to make it easier to
recognize the subject or to say something more about
it.
3) Grand scenic. Show the subject immersed in
its entire surrounding. This can be done if the
surrounding is meaningful to the feelings you want
to convey.
In any case, the viewer's attention must be
attracted to the main subject first, and only then
he can wander around the rest of the picture. If the
viewer's eye does not go directly to the main
subject as soon as he looks at the picture, the
photographer has failed his mission.
Here are a few useful tips in order to emphasize the
dominant feature. Put your main subject in the
foreground so that it appears bigger. Typically,
this requires a large depth of field. Another
popular method is using converging lines toward the
subject to direct the viewer's eye where we want to.
Putting the dominant feature against a contrasting
colored background is effective, too. For instance,
the main subject could be a splash of color against
a complementary colored backdrop. Finally, a shape
with a textureless background will serve the purpose
of making the main subject figuring prominently. An
example of this might be a flower in the desert
sand.
Balance
In a photograph, more than one object or person is
usually present. Each item in an image must be
properly balanced. A balanced composition is
pleasing to the eye because inspiring a sense of
stability. Each item has a weight or visual
importance that depends on the level of attraction
for the viewer's eye.
 Balance
can be symmetric or asymmetric. In asymmetric
balance, a small object is balanced by another
bigger having more or less the same visual
importance. For instance, this is the case when a
small highly colored or contrasted object is related
to a bigger but plain or textureless item.
Rhythm
Rhythm relates to time and it implies adding the
time dimension to photographs. As we saw, the viewer
should be first attracted to the main subject, but
then there are other (well-balanced) items in the
picture he should look at. The photographer should
be able to take the viewer in a journey, to involve
him in the image. The journey begins with the main
subject, and then the viewer should be led to the
rest of the picture smoothly and with participation,
along items of secondary importance. Think about
this imaginary journey and try to compose it in your
picture so that the viewer will be delighted to
follow you and to go all over the path of your
vision.
Andrea Ghilardelli runs a photo retouching and
restoration service at
ilghila.com.
|
