 Being able to create a pleasing composition in your photographs is a skill that you've no doubt been working on throughout as long as you've been taking photographs. Going beyond the simple rule of thirds of course is the first step into levelling up these compositional skills. The trick is of course to be able to see the options in front of you, to understand how they're working, to be able to put them together in a wonderful image. And a great way to start learning this skill, to improving this ability, is to dip your toe into the world of minimalist photography. So let's start to use that simplicity of these minimalist photographs to understand and demystify the concepts of composition. How's it? How's it? At some point you have probably wanted to improve your photographic composition skills and you've gone onto a website and watched a video and they have those photographs, you know, with the lines drawn all over them and using phrases like all, you know, rules of odds and golden ratios and all those sort of, you know, what seem at sometimes very arbitrary concepts. So it's kind of hard to understand because you can look at these photographs and you go, oh yeah, I kind of get it. But then when you are out there taking your own photographs that unfortunately all those lines that they'd rather conveniently drawn on the other photos are of course not there. So you're confronted by all of these aspects that are competing for attention while you're trying to focus on one thing. When you strip the image down to its bare minimum, then what you are trying to achieve by learning these compositional elements becomes so much clearer. So that's why minimalist photography is a fantastic tool for you to use to be able to work on these individual elements at one time. Of course the best way to learn anything is to to actually practice it and I hope that at the end of this video we'll have the confidence and the motivation to go out to to practice some of these aspects because they can be done anyway. You don't need to have sweeping vistas or what have you because minimalism is about isolating a subject and that's the first aspect of composition or a good composition is to be focused about what it is that you want to photograph to isolate the thing that is pleasing to you that you want to be the subject of the image. Minimalism has this idea and it's very hard. So the first thing to practice is to go around even in your home where you are right now and try and find things that you can isolate out that you can find individual items, elements that can be the sole focus of the image that there is nothing else to distract from that photograph than just that one thing. Don't feel that you need to photograph the thing in situ that you can't move it. Of course you can if you want to try and move something against the white wall then by all means do so. Practice isolating your subject to being it to that subject being the focus the sole focus of your image. Another element that you can use is filling the frame that goes much with with isolating. If you cannot move your subject, if you cannot isolate it physically or through some sort of you know just moving your feet then of course you can fill the frame with the thing that you are photographing that it leaves nothing else. There is nothing else elbowing its way into your images than this one thing. It is it is dominating because it is the only thing in the frame. There is no negative space. The frame is the subject and the subject is the entirety of the frame. So there were two nice easy ways to get yourself warmed up to get get started with with learning about you know how to use compositional techniques. Anyone who has even a passing interest in art is familiar with the concept of leading lines you know the the road leading off into the sunset and and and our eyes are drawn along that and of course in minimalist photography those lines are massively defined that they are they stand out and they're so obvious. So if you are struggling with possibly the concept of being able to find these lines in front of you then look at minimalism try and create lines from shapes that are around you you know if you have access to a tennis court there is a fantastic example of lines that are already made for you use them see what you can do with them. Lines can be formed from pretty much anything anything that helps guide the eye through the frame so you are now in control of of the viewer's experience of your photograph. A cousin of leading lines are diagonals as well so you can sort of see that all of these very sharp angular things are forcing the eye to go to certain places to draw our attention to what it is that we as photographers what you want the viewer to be looking at. Next time you're out and about look for leading lines look for ideas and shapes and forms that could be leading lines that you could use in a composition to draw the viewer's eye where you want it to go. I hope that you're seeing that these concepts that you can use within your photography are they're not hard they're not difficult to understand if something you can see them put into practice and that's why I'm using minimalist photography as a way of isolating all these concepts for you so I do hope you're finding it useful. Almost an opposite of leading lines and diagonals is sort of centered and symmetrical images so this is where the subject is either dead center in the frame so there's an equal amount of space on either side or the photograph has a symmetry to it so that's you know so lots of patterns and we'll get off to patterns in a second so photographs of windows and office buildings and architecture often fall into these ideas of symmetry and you know and so centered compositions especially in our world that we tend to see on the screen on our TVs or in the movies people and people's heads especially put onto rules of thirds and use lots of use of negative space so this idea of central composition of having symmetry on your image can be a very useful tool to arrest the eye because it looks ever so slightly different to what we normally expect him to see. I do hope that you are finding this video helpful and if you are please consider giving a like so other people will see it too. So almost the flip-flop of centered symmetrical images is is learning about sort of foreground and depth that you can introduce depth into the images by using scale for example so one of the things that you see quite often in minimalist photography is people giving a sense of scale to things and people playing with the idea of scale and this is an important aspect to consider when thinking about depth in photographs and thinking about foreground how the whole image works together from a compositional sense is because if you don't give any context to your photographs if you're trying to show that a tree is huge and it dominates the forest then if there is nothing else for us to see to compare that tree against then we have no idea how big that tree may be it could be tiny because there is no sense of scale. Do think about the foreground and the depth in your photographs that these are not things to be just overlooked that if you want to include the foreground then have something in that foreground that is a leading line that takes you through into the rest of the photograph for example. When talking about composition the word pattern doesn't often surface but of course it is an extremely powerful compositional tool this repetitive pattern of things can can make a photograph feel either quite harmonious or very active and very urgent so don't discount the idea of pattern when you are looking at images and this kind of the image that springs to mind in my head is one of lamp posts going down a road so again you know combining things like leading lines with this repetitive pattern because it makes you jump from the one to the one to the one and it helps to reinforce the idea about what we want to see and of course with minimalist photography you can isolate patterns you can understand how patterns work what effect do those patterns have on the feeling in the image when they are just the whole image how do they combine can you combine two disparate patterns what happens when you do this is all the the beauty can you see the beauty and the wonder of minimalist photography because instead of having to tease these things out of a bigger picture that you can now start working on them individually and understanding how they work together colour colour is an important aspect of composition how do colours work because colours have a whole thing of themselves and it's very hard sometimes to to isolate colour in general photography but when we look at it from a minimalist point of view it's a lot easier to deal with that you are in control of adding the colours and even if it is just a case of taking sheets of coloured card and putting them together seeing what works seeing seeing how the balance changes how they interact with each other how do they they work with other subjects these these are fun little experiments that teach you so much about composition and and balance in a wider world you can't really talk about minimalist photography without talking about negative space you know that thing when you know the person is off to the side of the subject off the side and there's nothing there's just nothing else you know that's very hand-fisted way of explaining negative space and it's that idea that the subject although the subject should be the subject is not filling the frame which is sounds contrary to what we were talking about earlier which says the subject can fill the frame so this is this is why I think so many people get confused about photography is there seem to be contradictory rules if you want to call them that that on one hand people telling you to fill the frame and then the same breadth also telling you to to not fill the frame but this is kind of why these these exercises are so important the more that you try these exercises you know one of filling the frame with with the subject another using the subject with negative space then you understand when you should employ each one so sometimes I think the space doesn't work and sometimes filling the frame doesn't work it's your job to understand how they work for you how you can employ them so that your vision what you want to say comes across clearly framing is not necessarily just you know what is kept in the frame of the image but using elements within the photograph to frame other other elements so possibly framing your subject again minimalist photography is a great way of practicing this thing to understand how you can use items to frame things can you use negative space to frame your subjects these are these are so many fun things and I have to stress that these are all actually quite fun to play with these things because when you are more in control when you are more aware of these these items and you get better by being motivated to go out there and actually take some photographs and to practice these ideas then it's it is so much better for you because you have these tools at your disposal that you can use that you can you can toy with people that you can change their their perception of what a photograph should actually be what what it's what something should look like composition in photography doesn't have to be restricted as you've seen two rules of thirds it doesn't need to be composed of of theories and and ratios and what have you ultimately what it comes down to is a feeling does this feel right for you that's the question that you should be asking yourself every time that you compose a photograph using all of these tools that you have now learned is does this feel right for me if it feels a little bit odd if it feels like it doesn't quite work now at least you have some tools some skills to be able to understand why it possibly doesn't feel that it's quite right I do hope that you have found this helpful that has helped you to demystify some of the concepts around composition that is encourage you to go off and practice some of these these these exercises because the more that you do go out and take photographs and and practice these little bit then the more confident you're going to be about actually putting them into your own photography and then of course you're going to level up because you can start putting lots of them together if you are interested in other aspects of improving your photography I'm going to put up on the screen here a playlist of other videos that I've put together that I hope you've enjoyed thank you so much for watching and I'll see you again soon