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Essays: Photographic Composition

What is a good photo?

Some background: no camera ever simply records what was there. Absolute objectivity is a pipe-dream. There are many technical reasons, ranging from choice of film or white-balance and saturation, choice of rudimentary composition (what you leave in/out), exposure, aperture (for depth of field), lens-distortion, etc. If the criterion of "reality" is to be applied, then all photos using flash should be excluded, because the eye doesn't see anything in the few microseconds for which the flash is illuminating the scene. However, it obvious that there are many good photos that do use flash. Likewise, the eye does not respond to colours below a given illumination - if you take a 30s exposure at night by moonlight, it looks almost like daytime, but standing there watching the camera, everything is a dark shade of navy blue. Hence, critically, it must be something about the resultant image that reminds us of how we perceived the scene in the photograph. There is a scale of degrees to which this may be attained: if we define a "snap" as `a photo taken "in order to get an object in the frame"' (for example, `a photo "of the Eiffel Tower"'), then we have the low end in which the photo does not say anything about the object in question, other than "it was there". Generally, these do not make good photos. Contrariwise, the point at which a stranger sees what you were thinking about and starts to question and think further is the point at which you've crossed from reporter to artistic photographer.

Over time, many books have been written about techniques one might employ in order to make a "good" or "successful" photograph. In my view, there are no rules. The job of the photographer is to choose (or design) a scene that works well with the surrounding frame imposed by the photo. There are guidelines, that one might use in order to assist in composition, but so many times, people get it all back-to-front: that a given image does not abide by a particular guideline or "rule" does not make it bad - the sole criterion of interest is whether it makes the viewer resonate with what you were thinking when it was shot. You could, as David Ward admirably states in his book Landscape Within, seek to `connote more than you denote' - this being a short-hand for saying that pictures should convey more, in the forms of emotion or mood or be thought-provoking, rather than merely showing what the subject was like according to some idea of "realism".

What makes a successful, communicative, photo?

There are, of course, various techniques one might employ in order to help emphasize a point in a photo. The guidelines I present here are not prescriptive, but derived from a large number of other photos I've taken over the course of several years. Technique:

Note: in the interests of quality, these images are around 1024x768 in size, so you might want to resize your browser. Please feel free to post comments on these guidelines if you want.