 Composition is the bedrock on which all great photographs are built but it can be extremely confusing especially for beginners. So in this video I'm going to help you break down the core concepts and composition that really help you into easy and understandable tips. How's that? The problem with composition and photography is that because it is a system that has evolved over centuries to help visual people create images that seem to just hold themselves together there have been a lot of rules and ideas and formulas and theories that have built up over time about how to actually achieve this. I'm reminded that when I was a student I used to go to underground alternative clubs and the DJs there in that dark smoky environment would always play the most let's say avant-garde music because they were trying to show how much they knew and often education about photography falls into this trap that you know people talk about composition and they don't want to just cover the basic grounds again they want to show how much they know so they talk about you know gold and ratios and all that kind of stuff that just ends up confusing the person who just wants to understand how to create an image that feels harmonious and that's what we're going to look at today is you know really getting to grips about the important things in composition and photography. It cannot be overstated how important composition is when you are taking a photograph. There are many tips and ideas and tricks that you can employ but ultimately they all sort of point to one thing and that is creating an image that holds together rather than just a random collection of subjects on a frame. It helps to think about composition not as a set of rules that need to be followed but like a toolbox that you can open up and there are various tools to you know approach various things. If you want to take out a screw for example you don't use a hammer you use a screwdriver so when you think about the rules of composition in that way then you see that there's a lot more flexibility to them than often is implied that all photographs should you know check a number of boxes that you know it needs to have this and these have that to be useful it doesn't. All the image needs to do is to use the tools at your disposal to give the viewer the idea the feeling the emotion the experience that you want to give them but how do we actually get to this point where we have a useful set of tools. I'm a big believer in the idea that you know you need to make sure that you are approaching what is your photographing in a in a way that makes sense that when you look at something decide how you are going to photograph it not specifically from like oh this is a tree is i'm going to photograph it like a tree but more what is it that you want to do with the subject that you are photographing it that is a question that when you've asked yourself gets you so much further to actually beginning to lay that that foundation of composition it begins before all these rules and stuff simply by saying okay i have something in front of me what do i want to do with it how do i want to portray it i would encourage you right now actually to look around you to see what you might want to photograph and think okay how would i want to portray that specific item and how could i do that by using some of the compositional ideas that i already have it's quite possible that at this point you have asked yourself but what is good composition what is a composition that works and the answer is actually surprisingly simple it is really just to follow your gut when i'm out taking photographs i don't look around and and you know take a picture and i and i photograph on my phone quite a lot actually so it's a very quick process i look at you know see someone i take a picture of it and i kind of go does that feel right i'm listening to my gut i'm trusting my intuition when you start learning some of these approaches some of the tools that you are going to get throughout this when you when they start speaking to you when they become intuitive then you're going to rely on your gut a little bit more it's a weird little process but think about all the things that you do in in your day-to-day life that you don't even give a second thought to when you learn how to write it was it was tricky you had to learn all sorts of things but now you just write without even thinking about it walking it's the same thing you're going to understand the more that you look at these rules more you think about them that the more that they're going to become second nature to you the best composition is one that feels right that also includes breaking the rules if you want to break the rules in composition do so if it feels right for you but whatever you do when you break those rules break them with conviction right don't just make a little mistake leap into own that own that breakage something that doesn't often get really discussed i think enough in composition is is lighting lighting can impact the mood the feel of a photograph and it is extremely important that you have lighting and you control that you understand how it affects the way that an image looks like itself can be a compositional element and the way that it reacts to the subject or the thing that you're photographing also will change the composition if lighting is very harsh if it's middle of the day it's going to give you lots of shadows lots of angular things that you can turn into lines and framing and all those kind of you know effects that we can you know we can employ in guiding the viewer's eye around a photograph we're going to get on to somebody later on who is an exceptional exponent of doing this but how do you find all these things that are there in front of you just waiting for you to use last year i made a video about the squint method and it is such a helpful idea you know we confronted with loads of things it's like how to break down a scene into those lines those shapes all the the elements that can help us build a composition that is pleasing to us and and the viewer and the squint method very basically summed up is that you either you squint or you just kind of squint so everything is broken down into blurs in distinct shapes if you're not able to do that and this is a wonderful tip actually i share in the comments of the the previous video was just defocus your lens look through your lens and defocus it so everything becomes a blur see what stands out see the the points of interest that are there in front of you and how you can then use them to to balance out the composition how they could line up you know move around the tip we looked at earlier your lighting same sort of thing if you defocus the lens you're going to see the light and the shade without any of the distractions that are around you but that is just one aspect of you know messing with the scene in front of you the next one i think it's a beautiful idea that so few people actually even bother to think about elliot erwitt is a fantastic photographer the hugely talented and one of the the great series it is has about dogs and and these are dogs that are photographed from a dog's eye view he's gotten down low he's he's crouched on the floor so many photographers spend their entire lives photographing from five foot nine inches above the ground giving people the the view of the world that everybody else has as a photographer when you start playing with perspective when you start changing your viewpoint you are encouraging the viewer to experience the world in a different way if you want to you know play with dynamic lines and and you know all that kind of stuff and and weird perspectives then changing your viewpoint helps you achieve this give it a try if you've never photographed low or high looking down see what this simple approach can actually bring to your photographs that just elevates it one step up that makes it something a little bit different that stops people and they go oh I really like that I mentioned earlier at the beginning of this video that your composition gets a bit of a I suppose a bad rap either it's too simple or it is overly complicated and my advice with all of this would be that whenever you are thinking about trying to work on your compositions is is to keep it simple don't get overly complex thinking that you have to have your rule of thirds then some leading lines then all of these things collected together I always like cookery analogies and one of the things with that is that if you have millions of ingredients some of them are going to get lost you've over complicated the dish when you talk to chefs you listen to to the great chef's talk they talk about simple dishes simple dishes are the best because you just allow one or two ingredients to shine and think of the same thing within your compositions you don't need to have oh look at this you know golden ratios and fennel batchy stuff and all those kind of things just use the elements the tools at your disposal in a simple easy to understand method that communicates clearly what it is that you want to achieve with your photograph at this point you're probably going wow okay cool right I've got I've got some handle on the sort of composition I know a bit of rules of third I've got your leading lines all that kind of stuff but what can you do just to elevate that a little bit you know what are the what are some of the more specialist tools that you can use what well one of them is color like light color never really gets talked about in composition but we're all inherently aware of the power of color if I put up an image that's red how do you feel about it if I put up photographs that have contrast in colors it's quite clear what's going on your brain in your visual brain it can break it down into a way that just inherently makes sense remember earlier I was talking about you know the intuition that's what we're talking about here is those intuitions when you look at Pete Turner for example a hugely you know talented exponent of color photography you don't need to understand composition to make you understand the picture you feel it in your bones that's the beauty it's just a little bit of time thinking about color theory and again you don't have to get into it full on but just go back to all the art classes you had at primary school and see how they work see what you can use them to your own effect in your images then you come up to something like balance balance is that idea that if you have something in your photograph where everything's off to one side then the image feels like it's just going to tip over all right that's probably the simplest way of explaining it but if you balance elements making the eye you know feel like the image wants to just sit and and you know not fall over then that goes a long way to creating a harmonious kind of feel of course the opposite is true if you want to have a a disquieting or an unusual you know sort of disorientating sort of filter images then make your composition unbalanced that again we talked about the ideas of you know you have these rules but break them if you want to you don't need to follow them unlike the tool idea that we had you know where everything has a specific purpose think of it in a one step up that each tool has a purpose but then it has an anti-purpose as well see you know see what you can think about that if you let me know in the comments about some of the the ideas the anti-ideas especially that you can employ in creating you know compositions that have a certain effect I would I would love to hear them now earlier we talked about a photographer who used light shade color all these things in a spectacular way his name is Alex Webb and he is a master of a number of compositional techniques but the one that I would like to share with you now which is quite an advanced technique is the ideas of layering so in layering we have a concept that the frame the image the photograph is is broken up into elements that stretch away from the viewer so let's say a foreground and middle ground and a background and this gives your photograph a bit of a depth not the quite same as the depth of field but more of a of an emotional depth a narrative depth if you if you want to call it that with again without making it sound like it is too sort of like too too edgy you know educational educational what a terrible word you know because of course there's an educational I meant too kind of like you know like high brow sort of stuff like making all sound like his fancy pants right so there's this layering that we have there's basically the way you can think about it is you have an image where there's something going on the foreground there's something going on in the middle ground there's something going on in the background and all of those things tend to link together they enhance each other they support each other they give yeah they give context to an image this I feel is one of those compositional elements that if you are able to get a handle on it if you are able to figure out ways that you can employ it and I will just give you a heads up that Alex Webb does say that 99% of his photographs do not work so this is not an easy thing then it is going to radically make your photographs so much more I don't want to use the word meaningful but have so much more oomph to them that is the technical word oomph right and I just I really love it but in the meantime just look at his work see what sort of compositional aspects that we've talked about that he is employing remember that all of these things are simply tools use them don't use them employ them when you need to that goes so far to making composition and photography so much easier to understand but it doesn't really mean anything until you know how to use your equipment properly as well and if you want to understand how to use wind angle lenses which I'm sure all of you have check out this video over here thank you ever so much for watching and I will see you again soon