Composition is ... a feeling ... sometimes!

Explore Landscapes #22: A recent podcast got me thinking about composition and how do I know when I've found a 'good' composition. Do I know it ... or do I feel it?

Curves, bricks, and cobbles - Hamburger Fischmarkt

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts tonight (see my post Creative Inspiration) as I was out for my evening walk. Matt Payne was interviewing Richard Bernabe (I would link to Richard’s website but it seems to be having problems at the moment) - or rather I should say that they were interviewing each other for their respective podcasts.

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It was a fun conversation as they recorded the podcast while making the trip across the Drake Passage - the body of water between South America's Cape Horn, Chile, Argentina and the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica. It’s renowned for being ‘quite an adventurous exploit’ - due to extreme weather and huge waves.

Anyway, the topic of conversation came around to composition and how you learn, understand, or practice it. Richard made an interesting point that he intuitively ‘feels’ that a composition is good rather than uses specific composition tools or rules to help him compose an image.

Hamburg Dock Crane

This got me thinking about my own approach to composition and what I do when weighing up a scene and thinking about how I want to photograph it.

I’ve also had times when the composed scene in my viewfinder just feels right. I haven’t had to try very hard to determine a good composition - it’s just presented itself to me.

Thinking more about those times, when the composition just feels right, it would seem to be when I’ve been out photographing for some time and I’m already in my ‘flow state’. Other times, I try to find compositions but just can’t see them for looking.

Concorde at Manchester Airport (UK)

It’s at these times when I’m more ‘mechanical’ about potential compositions - running through a mental rolodex in my head of compositional rules (I’ll come back to why they’re not rules later) - or remembering images that I’ve taken or seen in the past - and seeing if they help me to converge towards a pleasing composition.

I spent a good bit of time this evening going through some of my older images - mostly taken before my move into landscape photography - to see what I could uncover/remember about my early days of composition - or lack thereof.

When I lived in Europe (5 years in Toulouse, 2 years in Munich, and then 8 years in Hamburg) my photographic genre (to put myself in a box) was urban and at times, abstract. This was back in my days of being an engineer.

Hamburg Airport - Waiting for my plane to come in

Many (almost all) of the images that I took back then have a very distinct style of composition. They’re almost exclusively shot with a wide angle lens; they accentuate perspective, and feature leading lines, geometric shapes, and repeating patterns.

As I’m on the wrong side of 50, when I started my engineering career, I spent about 10 years drafting engineering drawings on film using pencil or ink. These 2D drawings represented 3D objects, and that gave me good spatial awareness, a sense of perspective, the use of leading lines, patterns, etc. Many of those things carry over into my photography - especially in terms of how I interpret a scene in terms of lines, shapes, and textures.

Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile, Paris

Thinking back to my early days in engineering, I was a lowly junior engineer in the structural repair office at British Aerospace at Hatfield (UK). I clearly remember our Chief Structural Engineer, Henry Geering, looking at one of my ‘better’ engineering drawings and saying that yes, that looks right, and signing it as approved. No calculations, eye-balled quickly and approved. I was pleasantly suprised as often visiting Henry was like taking a trip to the headmaster’s office at school. So it seems that engineering structures can also feel right - just like the composition of a photograph.

However, I don’t want anyone to think that this always happens - that I feel the composition is right - take the picture, and am delighted with the result. I would say that it’s about 50/50 - feeling composition vs making a composition.

The Shake Shack - Crystal Cove, CA

When it doesn’t feel right - or I can’t make a composition feel right - then I get out that mental rolodex and look for some assistance.

“We don't make a photograph just with a camera, we bring to the act of photography all the books we have read, the movies we have seen, the music we have heard, the people we have loved”. - Ansel Adams

There are all kinds of composition ‘rules’ out there: include a main subject, the rule of thirds, foreground interest, leading lines, use negative space, visual weight, - and the list goes on.

What I would encourage you to remember is that these are not absolute rules - they are suggestions - things to try when you’re looking to find (or strengthen) a composition. Try one or more of them, see if you like the result, how do you feel? Don’t like it? Try something else.

And the best practice for composition, is, composing and making more photographs. In parallel, rather than doom scrolling on social media, spend some time with your favorite photographer’s books, look at their images, and see what compositions you see and most appreciate.

Then, next time you’re out in the landscape composing an image you’ll have more ideas in your own mental rolodex to reference.

“Your First 10,000 Photographs Are Your Worst”. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

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