Sharpen Composition Skills

Using the surprisingly varied and photogenic Point Chevalier Beach as our canvas, you will learn strategies for refining your picture composition.

You will learn that good composition is hard-wired into your brain. You just have to let it do the work.

You will learn the Four Compass Points of Composition. These are four simple strategies that could instantly improve your compositions and, with it, your photography overall.

Composition is one of the key skills of photography. The term comes from Fine Arts traditions where it refers to the skilful placement or arrangement of elements – such as the faces, bodies, arms, props and landscape – to create a pleasing balance of forms. The artist with traditional materials, such as paint or pencil, has full control over every element of the image: not only where to place objects, but also their colour, the lighting and even their relative sizes.

In photography, the elements making up a picture are, by and large, encountered, not constructed. They occupy their relative positions before we find them. Only when the picture is specifically constructed in controlled environments such as the studio can one compare its composition with the practice in Fine Arts. 

Composition in photography then reduces to the skilful control of the disposition of elements within the picture frame. This has a most important consequence for practical photography outside the studio, and often even within the studio: picture composition comes from indirect changes – from control of photographic tools and from the choice of camera position.

• Composition
• Exposure
• Lens technique

• Camera
• Lenses
• Tripods (optional)