Composition

Now let’s talk about composition. There are many cool things in real life that sometimes we feel compelled to capture with our camera. But in many instances we can’t just pull our camera out and shoot to get a good picture. Our normal visual experience of the world is very different from a camera. A picture is bounded by a frame. The person that looks at a picture reads the content within that frame and tries to recognize and understand whatever the picture is. So you have to choose how you are going to compose your picture. In other words how you are going to frame that what is in front of you.
However, good composition is so much more than how you are going to crop the world you see into the rectangle of your viewfinder or LCD screen. Good composition involves arranging forms or shapes, tones, and colors in a pleasing way leading the viewer’s eye towards the subject. In bad composition the viewer’s eye may wonder around and whoever sees that picture may ask what the subject or purpose of the picture is.
Good composition can be about emphasizing or helping your viewers to see things that they probably wouldn’t have noticed on their own, or it can be about capturing something ordinary from a common every-day life and frame it in such a way that looks interesting.
Composition requires some creativity, imagination, and exploring attitude. But you don’t need to be artistically talented if you learn some general composition guidelines. I will teach you some of them. But please remember that these are guidelines. You won’t always find them in every successful picture. These are just some basics, and sometimes you may need to break these principles. But before you break them, learn them and then, if you omit these principles, make sure you are able to justify why you did it. Also be aware that there is a lot more on this subject than what I can share with you in this course. There are in fact books and courses just focused on composition.

Here is a list of some composition elements.