 what makes an awesome photograph? Ask any group of photographers and you're more than likely going to get the answer back that at the heart of a great photograph is good composition, which is very handy because that is exactly what today's video is about. It's like what is good composition and how can you use it to make your own images better? How's it, how's it? This July I was fortunate enough to be in America visiting a very dear friend of mine with my four and a half year old son and we were walking around the Inner Harbour in Baltimore on one of those scorching you know the days where it was like oh my god like so hot like your underpants are kind of melting and so there was me of course without a hat because of course all right and we decided to go and seek the cooling embrace of the AC and the Science Museum and we walked in there through those giant glass doors and I was confronted with everything that I love about photography oh it was shapes and forms and colors and stuff like that it really it it tipped all my photography boxes like boom but of course my four year old was like ah daddy daddy we was going on earth all the the fossils and and you know dig and all that sort of stuff so he was more interested in that so yank you know my shirt and I got out my phone and so I often do and take photographs just almost by instinct you know kind of just going with my gut and and knowing that with a couple of tweaks that I would have good compositions of course it wasn't always the case that I was able to photograph so freely and to chart the progression to help you on your own journey we need to go back to basics I'm indebted to Mr Lewis and his primary school art class for introducing me to the power of leading lines we used to sit there in the classroom with a sheet of paper and a ruler and a pencil and make all these vanishing point lines on a piece of you know on that that piece of paper and draw you know telephone poles and trees and things these oddly weird symmetrical landscapes going to a single point you know that there was no other deviation right and and it showed how powerful a leading line could be you know the way that those lines draw the eye so powerfully to the thing that we want them ultimately to see leading lines are great but this feels very front to back that there's there's isn't really much movement across the frame and of course with that you can start using diagonals to think about like diagonals as as some steps that take the eye up and down the photograph much like when you look out the window of a car you know you're driving along and all the the wind you know the the the hedges and the trees and mountains and the background and all that sort of stuff it all smears into the lines that go left and right and they are pulling your eye left and right all the time so so these lines can be used to create feelings of movement create a dynamic feel within the image and then of course you run into the gatekeeper of of composition the rule of thirds that rule of third that is something that we get told again and again and again ah this is this is the most important rule of composition or maybe not the most important one but the one that gets offered up as the first point of call that you put something on a line that's intersecting and then you end up with a pleasing composition those were the lines they were the basis of my compositional chops that i was getting through magazines of my interest in photography had been sparked by listening to my father my grandfather you talk about taking photographs so about very keen amateur photographers and for them it seems so effortless seems so easy just to take these photographs and i too wanted to become a photographer for whom everything just happened easily so when i was old enough and i was lucky enough to get accepted into art school i jumped in my red beetle one day and i drove down the highway to Pretoria Technicorn photography school and i sat in the introductory class and they gave us a roster and on that roster was a little square that said visual communication two words that opened up so many possibilities to me as the lights dimmed in this lecture hall and there was a big screen that we were all sitting there looking at and at the back you could hear the clank of the you know those those old Kodak carousels you know clink clink you know the little slide projectors and up on the screen there flashed Cecil Beaton's photograph of the Chinese policeman framed within the doorway and all of a sudden a new word entered my my photographic vocabulary and that was framing i'd heard about filling the frame before but this was framing within a frame the idea that if you stepped back a little bit and found an element within your composition that would frame the thing that you were interested in it makes for a more interesting and balanced composition that there's something visual going on it's a step towards a good composition rather than just a higgledy-piggledy mess of elements within the scene that you haven't really taken any time to to juggle to to manipulate to to place into a position where they are working in harmony how amazing that just one photograph can open up a mind like that i've been using a lot of Steve McCurry's work in this video to illustrate the point because he is such a wonderful photographer when it comes to composition of using these ideas these concepts in very powerful yet simple ways and one of these is center dominant i now for years i was like oh that i would never put things in the center because i felt like oh no to have a good composition is to have things on a third remember we talked about the rule of third issue right because that was all i'd learnt but as soon as i kind of realized that you know the reason that Steve McCurry and many other people put that eye of a subject in the center of the frame is that it gives that effect that you've probably noticed from time to time when you walk around an art gallery and there's a sea of faces and one or two of them will leap out at you really capture your attention draw you in and these are often the ones with a center dominant eye that also you know creates this effect which feels like it's kind of following you around the room you know like in those old horror movies where you know the scooby-doos you know the eyes and the pending up and they move around similar sort of thing they are drawing you in there and and it goes to show that you know composition is yes they're called rules but they're also suggestions a good composition is one where i feel that you are using the elements within the frame to make an image that has a purpose that you are taking these rules and using them as a framework a scaffolding if you will in which to hang the bits of your image the first camera that i got to use on any sort of regular basis was my dad's Canon a1 and that came with a little manual that showed you sort of various bits and bobs and one of those you know tips for taking pictures was to fill the frame to you know to to make sure that the subject took up as much of the frame as possible now that's really you know some some good advice to give you some impact but you want to be careful with it you want to make sure that sometimes you know where the difference lies between too close and not giving your subject space to breathe and lacking any sort of impact and this is where it's so important to go back to this idea of instinct you know the more that you work on these things the more that you kind of are just aware of what's going on then the easiest is going to become with your photographs with the process because you are going to know instinctively what feels right despite my shaggy hair and and generally unkempt appearance as a as a photo student am i the way that i kind of i was i was very you know cack handed about all things that i did i was becoming increasingly drawn to sort of symmetry in photographs that for some reason they make me feel still they have a calming relaxing vibe to me and and often symmetry is overlooked because in these this day and age you know we want people to to to see our photographs so we resort to kind of visually shouting with them by having lots of movement and and dynamism but symmetry can be so peaceful have an employee you just you know if you're thinking about those you know the center dominant eyes or you look at the work of say like a martin shuler you know he gets really up close you know so he gets he's getting closer to the subject and often because of this there is a feeling of symmetry within the frame there's nothing else to to distract your eye that you know that it is that example of why these are good compositions because the frame is close enough that you get the impact but there's still a little bit of space to breathe they would feel very different if the frame if it was just on the face if the face filled the whole picture that's where we're starting to get to knowing what is a good composition because it feels right i was walking around with my bucket of two pence pieces and they're standing in front of the coin fall feeding due to flee the the the coins into the slot and watching them collapse onto that sea of of copper colored discs on that machine i was struck by how pleasing that composition actually was the repetition of all of these identical things albeit you know in a kind of a haphazard way but the shapes were all there and there in the middle was the the big prize that you want to get you know like a piece of something like that because you know then the largesse in these fairgrounds knows no bounds and it struck me as as odd you know why is it so nice to look at this and and of course it's because as humans we are drawn to patterns we are drawn to repetition of the same thing over and over again it again i think it comes back to this idea of you know that we don't have to think too much we can just enjoy it much like the the idea of symmetry comes in there and with patterns and repetition within your own photographs that you can again give that sense of perhaps stillness perhaps a sense of urgency if you're losing dynamic lines when you're diagonal lines with sheets of paper or something like that and then of course to throw off the viewer's eye once they think that they're nice and relaxed you can put in an object that seems completely out of place much like the pez dispenser again steve mccurry does this to masterful effect and i'm sure that once you start seeing these ideas that you can put them into place in your own photographs that you are starting to get a handle on what is a good composition because you you're understanding the basics of these elements and when you understand the basics of them and how they work and how they actually contribute to a great photograph then you are one step closer to mastering the process in my third year in photo school we went on a trip to the ducansberg to meet all the other photo students and we were walking around taking pictures and and all of a sudden it dawned on me that i hadn't really been thinking about the pictures that i was taking i was kind of reacting to things and and ending up with actually what i felt were quite good photographs in fact one of my pictures which was like a throwaway image of a tree one prettiest picture the time from from the judges we used to have like a little competitions thing there and and that was the moment when i have started to not think too much about the actual process of composition i'm now going in in an instinct mode to shooting with the gut and the results are actually not too bad and from that moment forward it has made the idea of taking pictures so much easier to the point now where i can actually concentrate on trying to placate a small child wanting to go and discover dinosaurs and do all the other cool things that they have in the science museum there in Baltimore but at the same time be able to get some wonderful photographs i really enjoy visual communication was the beginnings of me learning to express myself photographically and if you'd love to also learn the language of speaking your own voice through your images then click on the video on screen now