A Guide To Landscape Composition

[Kan Win]

A big thank you "cedric_r " for the link.

Great

Kan Win

[Bob B]

Thanks for the useful tutorial. Have some karma.

[soul_enigma]

nice pics!

[Leehman]

Well thought out tutorial. Thanks for posting it.

[walter23]

Great little write-up on composition. I'll have to internalize those points for next time I'm out shooting.

But I also want to argue something:

Originally Posted by Goofup

Here’s an example of the horizontal rule. It’s a shot where the thin strip of land splits the picture in half.

I think this is the best of the bunch. Sometimes when I'm out shooting I'll find a simple centered composition which I really like, and then some forum pundit in my head will yell about the Rule Of Thirds and I'll kind of robotically shift my subject to a thirds point and shoot it that way.. then get home and look at it and think "Man, I should have kept the original centered composition".

The point is that you should never follow a rule just because it's a rule. That will only lead you to disappointment. The thirds rule is better expressed as a general principle that asymmetric compositions will tend to be more pleasing (especially with things like portraiture, etc), and is really a way to force you to think about the geometry of your composition rather than just following your natural tendency to point the camera straight at your subject and shoot it as-is. But it should never be followed robotically.

My opinion anyway.

I like your centered composition with the treed shoreline neatly splitting the sky and foreground, both of which are very similar in tone, colour, and detail. Giving them equal precedence makes for an elegant image (though yeah, it's not the most striking image ever).

[RJohnston]

Originally Posted by Paul Meusburger

Hi all,
I am new to this site and would like to get your opinion about this composition. I live in Cape Town (South Africa) and took this picture with my 5D on a 24-105 mm lens. Should I change the sky?
http://i195.photobucket.com/albums/z.../CampsBay2.jpg

Paul

One thing which makes you image work, is the lines are not vertical or horizontal, they go at angles through this composition.

[RJohnston]

Originally Posted by walter23

The point is that you should never follow a rule just because it's a rule. That will only lead you to disappointment. The thirds rule is better expressed as a general principle that asymmetric compositions will tend to be more pleasing (especially with things like portraiture, etc), and is really a way to force you to think about the geometry of your composition rather than just following your natural tendency to point the camera straight at your subject and shoot it as-is. But it should never be followed robotically.

My opinion anyway.

I like your centered composition with the treed shoreline neatly splitting the sky and foreground, both of which are very similar in tone, colour, and detail. Giving them equal precedence makes for an elegant image (though yeah, it's not the most striking image ever).

One reason this works for you in spite of the horizontal, the smoke which is bright, trailing away at an angle.

There is another rule we learned, PLACE your main subject when it can be, at the intersection where the vertical and horizontal lines cross. By doing so it makes a more powerful composition.

[TerryMoore]

Good attempt at explaining the rule of thirds mate! With your first sequence personally I would have gone with more water than sky due to its texture and allowing your eyes to search its surface for any other element that could have been part of the original composition, rather than a bland sky. Your Vertical example is good too. I would go further by adding that conventionally we tend to view things from right to left like reading a book. positioning your vertical subject to the right appears more natural as if the dead space on the left leads you to the Silo. Nice job!

Kan, I see what your saying, photography is based loosly on conventional rules that we apply or not apply. we either use them or break them, sometimes the later works out as a better composition. Your examples explore just that. Thanks!

[_alpha_]

Thank you, Googup, for the post. I think I've never heard about leading lines before.

[Ron65]

Excellent post..

Have some "K"..

[DonT]

I have to laugh at this one since I was once told that my shots are very typical, i.e. boring. The horizon is straight, I tend to balance the image in thirds and generally boring. I will have to try and breakout of that this year. I'm just not sure how I'm going to that on my landscape image. And it's not just horizontal or vertical but how about circular thirds?
Rules are there to keep us grounded in prospective, but sometimes we just have to break that rule to see what happens, or they just don't apply. What's it going to cost? A few million bits to play once in awhile. And how do you handle abstracts?

[Bevis]

that's for this write up. Helpful to me as a beginner. Tried to use some of these concepts yesterday when I shot some wild black eye susans that bloom every October.

[rancuniere]

Originally Posted by Goofup

Disclaimer: I went to the local lake and popped off all these shots within an hour specificially just for composition examples here, ok? Also, I wrote this with the beginner in mind- for someone trying to get a handle on basic landscape composition.

To me, a beautifully exposed picture with bad composition is no different than a beautifully composed picture with bad exposure. But get both right and you got a winner!

There’s lots of Rules Of Composition. Using:

Leading lines. They lead the viewer’s eye down to you main subject.


S-curve. Another way to lead the viewer’s eye through your picture (sorry, best S-curve I could find at the time).


Color. Bright colors can be used as a focal point in an image. Reds, yellows, and even whites tend to stand out.


Geometric shapes (Now you know why some have a fascination with doors and windows).


Repetition. A repeating pattern also tends to guide the viewer through the picture.


Diagonals. They just have a more dramatic impact that pure horizontal or vertical lines.


But that’s not all! There’s the Golden Mean, the use of framing, selective focus, Golden Triangle, Golden Section, etc., more composition rules than you can snap a shutter at!

But the main one most photographers must be familiar with is the Rule Of Thirds. Or, to put it very simply, “Don’t center it!”. We’ve all seen the Rule Of Thirds grid- a couple of horizontal and vertical lines placed at 1/3 and 2/3 down and across the “canvas”:



The Rule Of Thirds simply says that what we should be doing is (usually!) placing the main horizontal or vertical lines of a picture on about one of those lines instead of the centerline. Why? I could go on and on about how man has studied good looking paintings in the past and found out they all pretty much had the same things in common, so we’ve come up with some “guidelines” for composition. Nice to know, but so what. All you need to know is: you need to use them whenever possible because they will just plain make your pictures look better!


The Horizontal Thirds Rule

To me there’s actually 2 “Thirds” Rules. One is for horizontal lines, one for vertical lines. we’ll get to the latter in a minute.

Here’s an example of the horizontal rule. It’s a shot where the thin strip of land splits the picture in half.



Yes, it’s dull, boring, no subject, horrid, I know- I took it on purpose that way so we could concentrate on composition. But it’s even more boring and dull and funny looking because the picture is split in half! Let’s move that shoreline up to the upper Thirds line (1/3 down from the top):



Better. Still a goofy picture that needs a boat or something in the water, but come on, it just looks “better“, doesn’t it? Let’s try the bottom Thirds line (2/3 down from the top.



Better. Now we’re accenting the sky more. Still a lousy picture, but it’s a better lousy picture cropped so the shoreline isn’t cutting it in half anymore. Get the idea?

Let’s get something a little bit more interesting to look at. Here’s shoreline cutting it in half, upper third, and lower third:







See how simple cropping (or better yet, framing in-camera!) can make a picture look?

Here’s another Rule Of Thumb for you that you probably won't see anywhere else: Look through the viewfinder. If what you see would look good as a painting, click the shutter. If not, try it a different way.

The Vertical Thirds Rule

On our Rule Of Thirds grid above there’s also a couple of vertical grid lines, about 1/3 and 2/3 over. Just as it works for horizons, shorelines, etc, the Rule Of Thirds also applies to vertical lines (buildings, standing people, trees, etc.)

Here’s a silly silo abandoned out in the middle of a field all by itself. Nothing special, but it will do for “teaching” shot. Here I centered it. (Yea, I know, power lines! You can handle it, right?)



See how “off” that looks? It ain’t right. Let’s move it over to the left to 1/3 line:



Better. Doesn’t look so “static” anymore. Let’s try the 2/3 line:



Just a simple cropping in this case made a big difference. You can do this Rule Of Thirds thing in post process, or, even better, do it in-camera when you take the shot.

Of course some of you Rebels out there thinking “But Rules are made to be broken!” Absolutely. The Rule of Thirds can be broken for effect, and once in a while it even works! It’s ok to break the rules, just be sure you’re breaking them for a reason- to make the picture better rather than just to be different.

For instance, the “horizon or shoreline splitting the picture in half” rule can, and usually should, be broken if there’s a reflection involved where the top half and bottom half are the same, like this one:



One other thing. We’ve discussed moving the horizional or vertical lines off center to the Thirds lines, but what about moving them even further than that, like real close to the edge of the picture? Usually that’s about as bad as centering. It just doesn’t work good. The viewer thinks something is cut off by mistake and wants to know what it is.

So no more centered pictures, right?
Good.

Further reading:
KODAK:Beginnings of Photographic Composition
Learn Composition

This is exactly the type of instruction I have been seeking! Simple to follow and so basic for beginners like me. Would you mind critiquing my amateur shot attached? For my needs, just getting more out of those elusive moments that can become family memories is important since I have very little in the way of equipment. This was taken early one foggy morning at the JW Marriott Hotel in Orlando, Florida. The mist lent an eerie quality. Moments later, the sun popped out and the entire view was changed. I was attempting to capture that tranquility and ethereal quality that this scene offered. Keeping your instructions in mind from above, would this shot be deemd a success? I know I will need better equipment if I really want to go anywhere with this new hobby , but for now, is there any promise to the framing here? Thanks