Telling the Story in Composition

Composition is a wondrous thing, filled with rules, guidelines and mystery. A good composition can make the boring scene exciting. On the flip side, a bad composition can destroy a beautiful scene. Composition can draw the viewer into your story but can also send them running in the other direction. We can talk for hours, and I have, on the rules of composition. (You can check out part 1, part 2, and part 3 of composition on my blog.)  We can analyze the interactions of leading lines and the Rule of Thirds. We can measure distances of the Golden Mean. We can judge an image on the photographer’s use of foreground, middle ground, and background. We can weigh the virtues of symmetry, balance, and minimalism. These are all concepts that a photographer needs to know, understand, implement, and toss aside when needed. Yet, if you follow these rules and guidelines, you could still produce an image that is lifeless and will remain on your computer and never get elevated to your wall, where good photos are meant to be.

Let’s chat a bit about going beyond the basics of composition. When you arrive on scene with beauty surrounding you and all these composition concepts in your head, do you freeze? Do you find it difficult to find a compelling composition? Do you just start pointing our camera in whatever direction and hope something will stick? Do you understand the guidelines of composition but have difficulty recording them on your sensor? Do you ever review your images after a trip and wonder what happened to the grandeur you experienced?

If you have answered Yes to any of these questions, allow me to help. As Erin Babnik explains, as landscape photographers it’s our job to organize nature. Composition guidelines help us to organize nature in an even more eye-pleasing quality that our brains can understand and latch onto. Look at the image above – the actual scene is one of chaos as forests in the Pacific Northwest are and the viewpoint is a bit disconcerting. Yet with the leading line of the waterfall through the mossy rocks, your brain knows what it is supposed to look at and finds peace in that implicit knowledge. That’s what composition is meant to do.

As you arrive on the scene, ask yourself these questions:

What attracts me to this scene? What do you like about the scene? What made you stop your walk or the car and take a longer look? Is it how the light plays across the scene? Do you find a pattern that is appealing? Analyze why – even before taking out the camera. I will often stand on a viewpoint and soak in the landscape before me without raising the camera to my eye. I am looking for those elements of the scene that attract me – and there is no right or wrong answer. Take 10 photographers to the same location and they will create 10 different images. Your vision is your own and if you like that rock, then include that in your photo or make it the subject. It’s answering the question “what about that rock do you like?” And you photograph should answer that question because you are now telling the story of that rock.

I was reminded of this basic concept of composition in a book about writing, because creativity is creativity no matter the medium. In her book “Bird by Bird”, Anne Lamont describes a scene from Mel Brooks’ movie “The 2,000-Year-Old Man” (a movie I have yet to see, but now thinking it needs to go on my list) where a psychiatrist gives advice to his patient about letting the broccoli tell him how to eat it. Sounds weird, right? But not. The subject, the scene you want to photograph has a way of talking to you; telling you how best to photograph it at that time with those conditions. What made you stop and look at the scene in the first place is a whisper. Each photographer will hear a different whisper and will photograph to tell a different story. No not a different story, just a different version of the same story, to contribute to a greater understanding of the subject.

Not every photographer will be compelled to tell the same story and that is what makes photography such a rich and creative endeavor. British landscape photographer and YouTuber, Thomas Heaton describes this concept further in his video about photographing one of the most iconic landscapes of the Southwest United States – Mesa Arch. Photographers were lined up to photograph the arch as the sun rose which makes the underside of the arch glow. However, because of the overcast sky on that day, the scene required a different telling. Thomas and a few of his fellow photographers followed the whispers and found scenes that created beautiful images of the same landscape. They were able to add to the story that is Mesa Arch by not photographing the arch itself but the landscape around the arch.

Now this is where the going gets tough – set up your camera and start removing everything in the frame that doesn’t help tell your story. A common thread to photography is that while painters start with a blank canvas; the writer begins with a blank page - our canvas, our page comes pre-filled with extraneous bits and pieces and it is up to us edit out elements to create a compelling image – an image that narrates the story of this place. It’s tough. I know when I get to a beautiful alpine meadow and flowers paint the landscape in a rainbow of hues, I want to photograph all the pretties. I want to include EVERYTHING. And I bet you also have that same impulse. You get to the viewpoint and want to get it all in the frame of your camera, but then seem unsatisfied that you couldn’t record the grandeur of the view.

Have you ever uttered this statement? “The camera didn’t do the view justice.” That’s because you’re not being choosey about what to include and what to exclude. Going back to writing, there’s a saying in editing that you have to kill the darlings. You might have a phrase, a sentence, or even a character that you love – that makes you feel good about yourself and your abilities. But sadly, this element doesn’t work in the grand scheme of the story. It’s one of the hardest things for a writer to remove that piece. It can be that way with photography too. We love that little element off to the side, but it becomes distracting to the rest of the image. Crop it out. It helps to stop and listen to the scene, breath and watch, then start looking through the viewfinder without the tripod if you’re using one. Find the view and composition where that whisper you heard turns into a yelp of joy.

Say you’re at an overlook at the Grand Canyon. Of course, you want an image of the canyon with all the layers and textures of the earth. You frame up an image that encompasses as much as you can to show the grandeur. While you’re at it, you try to include a little promontory closer to you, but then something just doesn’t look right. At this point try one of two things. Crop the promontory out of the frame, then reposition yourself, investigate the promontory and create another image. Or ditch the first composition, move yourself and reframe an image that features both the promontory and the grandeur. That little promontory is trying to tell you something about the story of the place. Listen to it. I think you’ll be happy that you did.

We can know the rules or guidelines front to back and create technically correct images that never spark life in our audience. To take that extra step to listen to the needs of the scene and find the telling of the story of the time and place and only telling one story at a time, eliminating all of the extraneous side stories, you will be well on your way to creating an image that calls to your audience to stop and listen to the story you’re retelling.