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The Three Elements of a Good Photo
2. Subject
When most of us take a photo, we do so because something caught our eye.
That “something” is, unsurprisingly, your subject.
If you’re describing a photo to someone else, the subject is probably the first thing you’ll tell them. “This is a photo of a mountain with snow blowing through the air.” “This is a photo of a whale I saw last year.” “This is a photo of my friend.”
As humans, we think about the world in terms of subjects. A powerful documentary photo hits home because of what it shows us and how it shows it – but most people won’t notice the “how.” That’s because a good subject can captivate your viewers, and the other parts of an image – including crucial elements, even light – are allowed to fade into the background.
This is also where the technical side of photography comes in. How are you portraying your subject? Do you want to isolate it with a shallow depth of field, or do you want everything from the foreground to the background to be in focus? Will your photograph be tack-sharp and detailed, or impressionistic and blurred? Every technical decision is really just a creative decision on how to portray your subject in the best possible way.So, when you’re choosing the right subject for a photograph, you need to be thinking ahead. How would the ideal photo of this subject look, and how can you get to that point? Visualize the final result, and do everything you can to make it a reality.
3. Composition
Finally, the third crucial element of every photograph is your composition.
Composition is, quite simply, the arrangement of the items in your photograph. It encompasses your camera position, the relationships between the elements of a photo, and the subjects that you emphasize, deemphasize, or exclude completely. Composition is how you tell your story.
A “good” composition is one that tells your story effectively, without any distractions or confusion. Your viewers don’t have to puzzle through a convoluted mess to figure out why you captured that photo.
Composition is the stage of the game where you ask yourself “how.” How can you convey the beauty, excitement, darkness, intensity, softness, or any other emotion of a scene as perfectly as possible? How can you arrange the elements of your photo to make the image successful? A good composition emphasizes the parts of a photo that are the most important, while downplaying anything that takes away from the image.
As you would expect, composition is a very personal topic, and it has a lot of different elements to it – far more than I could ever cover in a single article. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll only cover them briefly:
3.1 Simplicity
Your photo should convey exactly what you want it to, and as little as possible should take away from your emotional message. If there are distracting elements in your photo, or elements with different moods and emotions, figure out what you can do to improve them.Eliminate everything you can that takes away from the quality of your photograph; move around your position or your framing to diminish its effect. Even if your goal is to capture a chaotic, distracting photo, you should do so as clearly and unambiguously as possible, without any “non-chaotic” elements that tell a different story. The best way to fix most photos is to exclude as many of the useless (or harmful) details as possible.
This does not just mean delete them in Photoshop. Although post-processing can play a role here, it is far from the most important thing. If you haven’t mastered the art of simplifying photos in-camera, it is a stretch to believe that the spot-heal brush can save the day.
Some unwanted elements may creep into your frame, and that’s okay. Very rarely will you come across a “perfect” scene with no distractions or issues. But if you are aware of those issues in the field, you’ve gone a long way toward correcting them as much as possible.3.2 Balance
Every bit of a photograph attracts a certain amount of attention – some parts more than others. Bright, saturated colors and high contrast tend to draw your viewers’ eyes readily, for example. The same is true for interesting subjects or unusual elements in a photo, just like they would in the real world.
This matters because of balance. When you take a photo, pay attention to where you place the elements that attract a lot of attention. If the left and right halves of your photo have equal visual weight, the composition is said to be balanced; otherwise, it’s an imbalanced image.
Neither one is right or wrong. You can take good photos that are balanced and good photos that are imbalanced. Either way, though, this decision has a major impact on the photo’s underlying feel – its moods and emotions. A balanced composition looks calm and peaceful. An imbalanced composition, on the other hand, will attract more attention to one side of the photo, leading to a tenser and more dynamic result.
3.3 Breathing Room
When you take photos, each subject should have its own breathing room, or personal space, in the composition unless you have a specific reason to the contrary. When two subjects bunch up against one another, or against the edge of your photo, the result can be disconcerting.This tip is mostly self-explanatory, but you’d be surprised how often I see people’s photos fail because they overlooked something so minor. An otherwise fantastic photo of a mountain could look completely unnatural if it is positioned too close to the top of the frame – or, even worse, cut off completely.
3.4 Interconnectedness
Good photos work because the elements in your composition work together rather than fighting one another. In some cases, this extends even further, achieving something known as interconnectedness.
Sometimes, different parts of a single photo have deeper similarities than it appears on the surface. For example, you may photograph a tree with the same shape as a distant mountain, or your subject wearing a shirt that matches the color of their eyes. Perhaps the simplest example is a landscape reflected perfectly in a pool of water. Patterns like this give the photo a reason to exist, even if not all viewers notice the connection consciously.
The idea is to make your image feel like a singular, unified whole, where there is a clear reason why you took the photo. Such a strong level of interconnectedness won’t occur all the time, but when it does, the results can be very powerful.
