Composition tips for beginner photographers that aren’t the rule of thirds

A new, old way of seeing

Frames within frames often emerge organically. Image by Author

I’m taking a break from two larger articles to write something simpler and aimed at photographers who are starting out or curious about how to learn composition, a term that is often used nebulously and intangibly on the one hand, or academically and inaccessibly on the other.

Many composition techniques look at images after the fact and attribute leading lines, frames, triangles, negative space- and yet the world rarely contorts to these ideas. How do we practice better composition while out in the real world? Here are a few better alternatives than the rule of thirds:

Compose with your bare eyes

As soon as you raise your viewfinder you are barraged with information, from exposure settings, to autofocus points, to gridlines. The cumulative effect is that it can become so distracting that you never properly consider the entirety of your frame. Worse, many viewfinders are not particularly bright, or are not detailed enough to show you everything which will become apparent in your final image.

The answer is to use the brightest and clearest viewfinder in the world- your bare eyes. Move around a scene and, when you find something you like, imagine the borders of your image around the scene. This is previsualisation in its simplest form.

Does everything within the imagined borders work for you? Is something distracting which can be moved with a step to the left or by kneeling down? How does moving change the relationships between objects in your foreground and background? Do you need to wait for something to move either into out of the frame?

An image which started out as a different shot entirely. Image by Author

You may have experienced an issue where something which seemed undistracting in real life sticks out like a sore thumb in your final image. This is often because our eyes and minds compensate out what they perceive as irrelevant information. By blurring your eyes slightly or squinting, you may be able to reduce your image to simple shapes, which could give you a better idea whether your composition is working.

Finally, once you raise your viewfinder to your eye, you may find that what it presents is entirely different to what you saw. The first step is iterating upon this: do you need to zoom in or out, or move closer or further away to bring your viewfinder image closer to what you previsualised?

Our full peripheral vision is that of an ultrawide lens (17mm on full frame), but we create our full peripheral view by darting our eyes around, and only fully resolve the view of a standard lens (42mm on full frame) at any one moment. This broadly means that when zoomed in, you will probably be more likely to get what you previsualised, however when working wider, you may notice that the spatial relationships have changed slightly. You can fix this by moving backwards or forwards until you have found the scene you originally envisioned.

Fill the frame

Image by author

Your image is a box that you get to fill. Think first about the borders of the box, and see what might be getting lopped in half by its borders. Do the shapes in the box broadly fit together, or does one overwhelm another?

Again, you may like to momentarily blur your eyes so that colour, shape and tone take over from the contexts we usually consider when looking.

The relationships between these objects can usually be change by moving your camera relative to your subject, your camera around your subject, or moving your subject.

You may be tempted to stay as wide as possible knowing that you can crop later. While this is sometimes useful, remember two things: First, zooming out will change the spatial relationships between the elements in your image. Cropping is the same as zooming in, but not the same as taking a step closer to your subject without zooming. Second- you only have so many pixels, and while we often have more than enough resolution to post on Instagram even after extreme crops, if you ever want to print your image you may find yourself missing those pixels.

Image by Author

Get the opposite

Something which has shown up repeatedly in writing I’ve read from truly excellent photographers like Gregory Heisler, Bill Jay, and Joe McNally, is that you don’t ever want to realise exactly what you should have done when you’re at home, a hundred kilometres from the gig. For these three, the answer was to look hard at what they were doing, and then remember to do the opposite:

• Zoomed in nice and tight? Get closer and go wide
• Dark and moody? Try a couple frames with different settings
• Wide aperture and slow shutter? What would happen with a small aperture and fast shutter?
• Physically turn around, what is happening behind you? What if you were on the other side of your subject?

Each of these are just examples of the general ethos to try and cover as much ground as you can- iterate your way into a photograph you’re satisfied with, and then isolate a couple of variables and reverse them.

The Rule of Thirds

With an article about why not to use the rule of thirds, I should be specific about why I do not like to teach the ‘rule’.

A lot of photographic education is designed to give students the most likelihood for photographic success as early as possible, and hard and fast ‘rules’ can be helpful to this end. This is why many teachers recommend negative space and the rule of thirds, they are the easiest way to get a compelling and ‘correct’ image. But with this comes the risk that a student conflates these specific tools for the ‘right’ way to compose an image. Overlays like the golden ratio similarly seem to suggest that we look at a photograph with certain innate and subconscious preferences for specific shapes. Of course we don’t.

Recently photographer and educator M.H. Rubin did an excellent job tracing the surprisingly recent origins of the rule of thirds. In this article, he quotes a very compelling sentiment from photography’s king of composition, Henri Cartier Bresson:

In applying the Golden Rule, the only pair of compasses at the photographer’s disposal is his own pair of eyes. Any geometrical analysis, any reducing of the picture to a schema, can be done only (because of its very nature) after the photograph has been taken, developed, and printed — and then it can be used only for a postmortem examination of the picture. I hope we will never see the day when photo shops sell little schema grills to clamp onto our viewfinders; and the Golden Rule will never be found etched on our ground glass.

I believe another Cartier-Bresson quote from The Decisive Moment beautifully articulates the way out of this stilted way of composing:

The photographer’s eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimeter. He can modify perspectives by a slight bending of the knees. By placing the camera closer to or farther from the subject, he draws a detail — and it can be subordinated, or he can be tyrannized by it. But he composes a picture in very nearly the same amount of time it takes to click the shutter, at the speed of a reflex action.

Sometimes it happens that you stall, delay, wait for something to happen. Sometimes you have the feeling that here are all the makings of a picture — except for just one thing that seems to be missing. But what one thing? Perhaps someone suddenly walks into your range of view. You follow his progress through the viewfinder. You wait and wait, and then finally you press the button — and you depart with the feeling (though you don’t know why) that you’ve really got something. Later, to substantiate this, you can take a print of this picture, trace on it the geometric figures which come up under analysis, and you’ll observe that, if the shutter was released at the decisive moment, you have instinctively fixed a geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless. Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment

Does he contradict himself by calling schema “use[ful] only for a postmortem examination” whereas the process by which “you can take a print of this picture, trace on it the geometric figures which come up under analysis”? I believe that these two quotes do not conflict with one and other, but rather point a photographer to where they should be- out in the world moving and iterating upon brand new composition, the results of which will reveal themselves under scrutiny, rather than superimposing hard and fast rules onto a world which is soft and slow.