Complete Guide to Black and White Photography
Black and white photography is the art of using different tones of gray, ranging from white to dark, to create compelling images.
in the past
We have written much more extensively about composition <anchor>in the past</anchor>, but the key in this context is that elements of your photo will change in black and white versus color. If you are taking portrait photos in color, for example, your subject may have vivid eyes that affect your composition significantly. The same is true in landscape photography, in which case a golden sky can draw the entire image upward. In both cases, you would need to compose your photo differently if you shot in black and white instead – and these are far from the only examples.
Composition Explained: Techniques for Photography Beginners
PL provides various digital photography news, reviews, articles, tips, tutorials and guides to photographers of all levels

# Composition Explained: Techniques for Photography Beginners

## Most beginner photographers struggle with composition. These tips will help you get started the right way.

Last Updated On September 15, 2022

Composition is critical. If you want to take powerful photos, it’s one of the most important parts of photography. Still, a lot of photographers start out only hearing about the rule of thirds, and they never go more in-depth on how to compose better photos. The good news is that you can learn more about composition – and you should. It’s a deep topic, and there’s no way to cover everything in just one article, but I’ll do my best to hit the biggest points below, in this chapter of our Photography Basics guide.

Table of Contents

## What is Composition?

Composition is the structure of a photograph. It’s how you arrange the elements in your image to create the look you want, and it can make or break an image. If you stumble upon an interesting subject — no matter how good the light is, or how unusual the conditions are — you still need to compose the photo well if you want a successful result.

You have an absurd amount of power to change the composition of a photo. Move forwards and backwards, left and right. Change your lens — zoom in, zoom out. And pay attention to which elements of the scene you’re including, as well as the ones you’re not. Done right, composition takes your subject and presents it to your viewers as effectively as possible. It is the mechanism for conveying a message with your photos.

I chose this composition very carefully to frame the crab between the pieces of grass.

## The Elements of Composition

Points, lines, and shapes.

At the most fundamental level, those are the elements of composition. Anything in your image – your subject, the background, tiny details that don’t even matter – are all points, lines, and shapes. Some of them are very complex, of course. A face or a tree clearly are not simple things. But they still have a shape, and they can help form the structure of an image.

On top of individual elements in a photo, there’s also the way they interconnect with one another. Several elements of a photo, arranged properly, are stronger than the sum of their parts.

To make this clearer, take a look at the photos below. These are side-by-side comparisons of a successful photograph along with its component parts. The first example is a photo from Yosemite. Based solely on the line drawing, you can see that the composition is very balanced, with equal amounts of interest on both halves of the frame. Drag the slider back and forth to see the before/after comparison:

Balanced landscape compositionBalanced composition line drawing

The next photo, from Death Valley, has a more dynamic composition, with strong diagonals running the length of the photo:

Diagonal landscape compositionDiagonal composition line drawing

Last is a photo from Jökulsárlón in Iceland, with a block of ice washing ashore. Here, you can see the lines and shapes that form the structure of the photo:

Triangular subject landscape photographyTriangular composition line drawing

To me, the interesting thing so far is that these three line drawings still work well on their own, and they maintain a similar emotional mood as the original image. I wouldn’t hang them on my wall, of course — but they have a certain internal structure, even as simple as they are.

When I’m out taking photos, do I actually imagine my subject as a set of black-and-white lines? I’d be lying if I said that I did. What I do think about, though, is arranging a good structure — which, deep down, has its roots in fundamental elements like lines and shapes.

## Intent

The big secret of composition is not that you should follow one structure or template for a majority of your photos (which is what the rule of thirds suggests). Instead, the important thing is to pick your composition intentionally.

Intent is the most important part of composition. Nothing in the photograph should happen by accident. Everything must have a reason to exist. If you remember that, and you really spend time in the field making it happen, your photos will skyrocket in quality. It’s almost impossible to avoid since you’ll end up putting more conscious thought into how a photo appears.

Intentional composition My composition here was highly intentional. I had to wait several minutes and try multiple times in order to capture the spotlight in the right place. Specifically, I needed to wait until the beam of light (which was spinning 360 degrees) pointed directly at me, so that it looked as if it were shining straight up. I didn’t just haphazardly photograph the Eiffel Tower without conscious effort. Instead, I thought of an image in my mind and did everything possible to make it a reality.

## Simplicity

Every photo you take has an emotional message — the core reason why you chose to take a photo in the first place. When you’re out taking pictures, one of the best things you can do is consciously think about the emotional message, and hone in on how you want to express it. That’s where the power of simplicity comes in.

Simplicity means that nothing in your photo takes away from the emotional message. If you’re trying to convey a sense of beauty at a landscape, eliminate everything from the photo that isn’t beautiful. That could be power lines, footprints in the foreground, a piece of trash in the frame, and so on.

At the same time, simplicity also refers to your composition. Don’t overwhelm your viewers with too much information, unless your goal actually is to capture an overwhelming, chaotic photo. When your photo tells the story you want without any distractions, it will be as powerful as possible.

No element in this photo takes away from my message. Every part exists for a reason.

## Balance

One of the main things I think about when composing a picture is balance.

Balance is fairly easy. To start, all you need to do is ask yourself how much attention each element in the image attracts. This is known as “visual weight.” Objects that have high levels of visual weight include bright objects, saturated colors, eyes, people, animals, high contrast, and unusual elements — anything that attracts attention in the real world. Then, figure out if the visual weight is distributed evenly across the frame, or if one half of the photo has more than the other (from left to right). If they’re roughly even, it’s a balanced photo. If not, the photo is imbalanced. (Neither is necessarily better than the other.)

Balanced composition diagramIs your photo balanced? To figure it out, think about the visual weight of every item in your photo. Then, imagine placing the image on a fulcrum. Which direction does it lean?

This works a lot like a seesaw, including the fact that you can balance a “heavy” object — your main subject — with a “lighter” object, so long as the lighter object is farther to the edge of the photograph (just like balancing a child and an adult on a seesaw). Take a look at the photo below:

The dragonfly has more visual weight here, while the silhouetted plant in the background has much less. But the plant is right against the edge of the frame, while the dragonfly is nearer to the center. So, overall, this is a balanced photo.

In photography, you have the choice to capture balanced photos or imbalanced photos. Neither is better than the other. What matters is that they both convey different emotions.

- Balanced photos are peaceful, static, and calm
- Imbalanced photos are dramatic, tense, and dynamic

If you’re photographing a gentle lake at sunrise, you might not want an imbalanced photo. But, with more intense subjects, it could be the perfect composition. It just depends upon the mood you’re trying to convey.

This image is imbalanced to the left. That makes it more dynamic and intense, which works well here.

## Breathing Space

When there are multiple points of interest in a photo, you may want to give them “breathing space” by spacing them apart from one another. Otherwise, elements of your photo will interfere with one another (or the edges of your frame), making for a sloppy composition.

Think about a scene where a few birds are flying through the air, and you want to capture all of them in a single photo. If one bird crosses in front of another, though, that area of the image will look messy and unintentional. It’s better, instead, if all your subjects have some space to breathe — between one another, and between the edges of your image.

All of my subjects here have plenty of breathing space.

The same goes if you’re photographing a mountain, and the peak is almost touching the very top of your photograph. In that case, it will draw unwanted attention and potentially demonstrate a sense of carelessness. Instead, it tends to work better if your subjects each have room to stand on their own, unobstructed by anything else in the photo. That helps you send a strong, cohesive message to your viewers.

No important object is bunching up against the edge of the frame, and my main subject (the mountain goat) has plenty of breathing space.

## Positive and Negative Space

Positive space is anything in your photo that stands out and attracts attention. Negative space is the opposite — areas of an image that fade into the background and don’t draw the eye. You can take photos with high amounts of negative space, high amounts of positive space, or somewhere in between. They all convey different emotions.

Photographs filled with negative space have a sense of emptiness, peacefulness, and isolation. They tend to be somewhat minimalist images, and they work well when you’re trying to show a sense of scale or loneliness. A single tree in a snowstorm would qualify, and so would the photo below:

Because of all the negative space, this image conveys a sense of isolation.

Photos with a lot of positive space are more intense, busy, and active. They include lots of little details for your eye to notice, although the downside is that they can appear crowded — harming the simplicity and clarity of your message — if you aren’t careful.

This photo has a lot of positive space, making it feel busier and more active.

These emotions are very important to your composition, and they help form the message that you want to send. If you’re paying close attention in the field, you can move around or adjust your composition in order to alter the ratio of positive space to negative space. Because of the different emotions they convey, this is a great tool to have at your disposal.

## Patterns and Relationships

In some cases, with care, you can capture photos that have more intricate patterns and relationships than just a simple composition. For example, you might photograph a landscape with an orange flower in the foreground, and orange light on distant hills. Or, you could capture a plume of smoke rising from a volcano at night, and matching with the shape of the Milky Way overhead.

There’s no end to the world of deeper relationships that are possible in photography. It’s not something you’ll find all the time, but you should keep an eye out. When a photo has an especially imaginative relationship, it will feel completely interconnected and intentional.

Similar shape in rocks and clouds The shape of the rocks on this hill are quite similar to the shape of the clouds — long, thin lines. That makes the top and bottom portions of the photo feel more interconnected, even subconsciously, which gives this photo a stronger “reason to be.”

## Conclusion

I don’t want to make it seem like composition is easy. In some sense, it’s impossible. Even the greatest photographers of all time never mastered composition, because composition isn’t the type of thing you can master.

Perfect composition is not an endpoint that you’re able to reach with enough talent or hard work. It is, instead, a shifting target that depends vastly upon your own, changing qualities, as well as the scene in front of you, and the emotional goal you have in mind. The rule of thirds won’t get you there. It’s a simple technique, mainly meant for beginners, and it only scratches the surface of what composition can be. The same goes for any other simple tip out there — none of them apply often enough to overrule the fundamental elements of composition.

Unfortunately, as much as I hate to admit it, that’s also true for reading about these things online. You can’t learn everything about composition from an article or YouTube video; it is far too personal of a topic. Composition is something you must go out and learn for yourself.

Hopefully, though, the tips in this article will give you a good starting point. Very few elements of photography are more important than composition. Done right, it has the power to make your photos truly stand out from the crowd.

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#### About Spencer Cox

I'm Spencer Cox, a landscape photographer based in Colorado. I started writing for Photography Life a decade ago, and now I run the website in collaboration with Nasim. I've used nearly every digital camera system under the sun, but for my personal work, I love the slow-paced nature of large format film. You can see more at my personal website and my not-exactly-active Instagram page.

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Joseph Oduor

Joseph Oduor

August 21, 2024 2:14 am

I thought I knew a lot concerning, composition until I read all these. Thank you.

0

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hari gopal

hari gopal

January 24, 2020 11:48 pm

you are providing valuable,very useful and clearly explained about the photography…thanks for the efforts and keep it up..

1) one small doubt is…in your page .. photographylife.com/what-is-exposure….you are mentioned in the Shutter speed section “some people build custom cameras that take decades to capture a single photo”

what is this mean? and where it is used?

-4

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Jeremy Day

Jeremy Day

March 4, 2023 10:06 pm

Decades-long seems like an exaggeration, but here’s an example of a “custom camera” (it’s a beer can pinhole camera!) that took an 8-year exposure image: mymodernmet.com/eight…ure-photo/

Cool stuff!

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Steve

Steve

December 27, 2019 5:22 am

Wonderful advice. Great photographer, great and generous educator

3

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Sunshine-Gausha

Sunshine-Gausha

August 18, 2019 4:01 pm

Excellent article. Thank you for this. This gives me a lot to keep in mind while I’m out, but doesn’t push anything on you like the “right way” to photograph.

1

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Saurav

Saurav

August 5, 2020 7:51 am

What’s the rule of three?

-3

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Nandhu

Nandhu

July 16, 2019 11:06 pm

I didn’t know what is composition untill i read this piece of article. Even then i had been unconsciously working on it in some photos. But i found some pics to be unsatisfactory due to lack of good composition. Now i have a better idea of what composition is and how it works.thank you so much. It really helped me.

3

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Amy nguyen

Amy nguyen

January 31, 2018 1:47 am

I really enjoy this article. I am new in this field and I only know the rule of three. Thanks for your sharing. It is really helpful

0

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Nuno

Nuno

December 23, 2017 3:45 pm

Spencer, this is one of the most thorough attempts to dissect and write about the subject of composition, such an abstract and immense field, having successfully defining or categorizing what and how visual information can be “worked” under some guidelines or rules to create a visual appealing photo.

You have made a lot of sense for anyone who wonders what makes a photo compelling, describing in a structured manner how it can be read/interpreted/used for oneself to go out there and improve what and how they are shooting. I feel more instructed on the composition subject, and I’ve read more that a dozen books about the subject but never read anything so well put as you have done here. Thank you for your clarity on such an abstract subject .

1

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Spencer Cox

Spencer Cox

Author

December 27, 2017 2:01 pm

Nuno, I am very happy that you found things to be so clear in this article, and thank you for your feedback! We have written about and discussed composition so much at Photography Life that it is starting to be clearer and clearer how to put some of these abstract ideas into implementable suggestions. And while there are still many intangible aspects of composition, it is a good feeling to know that there are indeed specific, concrete elements that make certain photos succeed.

1

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Gustavo Gabriel

Gustavo Gabriel

December 23, 2017 8:00 am

Very good article. I Love it.

I have been a portrait photographer and, thought, your text can be more specific for landscapes, it is precious for compose harmonic photos of portraits too.

Thank you and write more articles for us, please :D

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Ian Graham

Ian Graham

December 22, 2017 5:32 pm

And now that it has fully loaded (waiting or me to reawaken the PC?), it doesn’t show a before and after as much as a photo and the outline composition of that photo. But the message is now clearer. A helpful summary if the comments are taken at face value. Many thanks.

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Ian Graham

Ian Graham

December 22, 2017 5:19 pm

After 5 hours, this is still trying to load something. None of the photos that pertain to show before and after have loaded. It might have been a good article, but this is a significant bit that is missing. A pity. It otherwise seems well written and informative.

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