Lots of talk in the industry these days about Comp-Stomping and we have all heard the collective groans from other photographers when they see the same scene 1000’s on times on a daily basis. Personally I’m not offended by this and love to see all the creative variations and believe we should spend more time working on our own art than in the minds of other photographers. So what goes into creating an original composition?
I find that it helps a great deal to have a mental “focus” for my work, a sense of purpose for making the image, something to express through the scene in front of me. Something to make me or the viewer say “look at that”! All the compositional rules in the world don’t help me if that element is missing.
It is often the lighting conditions that make the difference between a mediocre image and a great one – even of the exact same scene. Obviously the Rule Of Thirds is a good place to start when considering the composition of a shot, and it is always important to recognise that composition with a panoramic is quite a different animal than composition with a single frame. One of the things that helped me several years ago was studying the work of the early topographic photographers. Capturing every dip, curve and peak of the surface shape of the land, topography can be highly symbolic of a love for the earth in general, for a specific city or simply for the beauty of the lines themselves. The techniques they used were patterned after the earlier topographic artists such as David Roberts and Hector Horeau, and embody many basic classical ideas of proportion and balance. Another interesting area worthy of examination is some of the better stereographic photography, which relied heavily on careful placement and balance of foreground objects to enhance the depth of the image when viewed in stereo – this same technique works quite effectively for 2 dimensional works also.
Being surrounded by so much beauty can be intimidating. A good approach is to concentrate on what it was that attracts you to a particular scene in the first place. What caught your eye? What made you get out of the car or step off the trail? It is easy to lose sight of this as we walk around and see so many possibilities. But something brought you here and caught your eye in this spot. What was it? And how are you going to show THAT THING to your potential viewers?
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Sig Nordal 