until the year 2000, the peak of film photography, when an estimated 85 billion photos were taken that year alone.
The newest technology, which had been in its crude infancy, was now coming of age and beginning to be a viable alternative to film. This resulted in a whole new swell on a new order of magnitude with digital photography. Now you could forget about taking your rolls of 12 or 36 exposures to the drug store or camera shop to get them developed: you could look at them instantly on the back of your camera. And when other breakthroughs of the Internet intersected with this, the door opened to instant sharing of our stories anywhere on the planet. A long way from one caveman to another, but nonetheless the same urge.
Then the biggest breakthrough to date occurred in 2007 when Steve Jobs released the iPhone. For the first time in history we had a workable camera that you were always going to take with you everywhere, because it was your phone. The genie was out of the bottle and advances in all smartphones have continued at an ever-increasing rate. Now we have a whole new order of magnitude of picture-making, with an estimated 1.2 trillion photos to be taken this year alone, as of this writing. Compared to the peak of film, there’s an increase of fourteen times. But with this explosion of photography and the number of pictures being taken and shared, is the quality of the work going up commensurately? Doubtful, right?
With all these technological advances driving our seemingly unquenchable thirst to make and share pictures, there are fundamental skills that are required to tell the story that both you and others will love. As you’ve seen, it’s not about the latest technological breakthrough, because at every point in man’s sentient history there has been an adequate means to make pictures and share them.
But what makes the difference between a snapshot that you take and a real photograph that you create? The first answer is visualization, which I covered in detail in my last book Advancing Your Photography. A photographer, who controls the process, first gets a vision of the image he or she wants to create and then takes steps to capture it.
This leads us to the next answer, which is the subject of this book. When you capture a photograph, you are composing a two-dimensional image within the frame of your camera.
This reveals a key skill that man has been using (or not) since those first scratched drawings: composition. When that first cave artist discovered that there were techniques to change perspective, dimension, viewpoint, and—most of all—emotion, this was the moment that art was born. Now it was the artist who could interpret life and show others what they saw and even felt.
I wanted to take a very long look, so that you can see we’re dealing with the deepest of subjects when we’re talking about composition, which is why I decided to tackle it with this new book. My goal is to give you a set of tools for composition in one compact handbook that you can carry with you on your journeys and refer to often, like your favorite cookbook in your kitchen, or—stating it another way—a large set of tools in your kit.
Here’s to your discovery of new skills and continued advancing
of your photography.
Marc Silber
Carmel, CA
How to Use This Book to Create Amazing Photos
“Every picture tells a story don’t it?”
—Rod Stewart
While every picture has the potential to tell a story, some really do and others … not so much. The photos that make you stop, look, and say “amazing” are the ones that tell their story the best.
And then there are the photos you pass by that don’t seem to have much to say at all … or do they?
No matter what camera you’re using, the two main skills to tell your story are composition and lighting.
There is a common misconception that composition is either intuitive or a gift that you have or you don’t, which can tend to block someone from learning about it. Another block comes from the pendulum swing from two extremes:
A.There are no rules to composition, you just sort of “feel” your way there; or,
B.There are nothing but rules and “laws” that will give you a formula to make your photo look amazing.
I believe that neither extreme is correct and, as with most things in life, the middle course is where you want to be. The way this works out is that you should know the composition guides, become familiar with them just as a musician learns his scales, and then start to practice until they come naturally to you and you can fluidly and, yes, intuitively work with them. But before you get to that stage it helps to have structure and a guidebook. This entire discussion holds true for use of natural lighting as well.
First of all, let’s define composition: It means how you place your subject or subjects within the frame of your camera in order to best tell your visual story. The derivation of composition in Latin is “put together.” You’re putting the subject of your photograph together in your camera space in order to communicate what you saw and felt to your viewers.
Composition is similar to cooking, where the same ingredients can be combined in a number of ways for a wide variety of outcomes: flour, baking powder, salt, water, and butter can be made into pancakes for breakfast, or biscuits for lunch, or an angel food cake for dinner. The same basic ingredients, with many different outcomes.
As you’ll see, there are many core ingredients to composition that you can use individually or in combination, with the same subjects to tell your story in an infinite number of ways.
Let’s think of these as “recipes” or tools that you can learn to use and have at your fingertips. The more fluid you are with them, the more you’ll be able to utilize them in imaginative ways to make creative photos. I’m making these easily available to you to help you expand your creative skills in each.
As you’ll see, the book defines 83 composition tools for easy use, each illustrated by one or more photographs or other works of art. As a note, these illustrations serve several purposes: first to show the tool being discussed, but also you’ll find many interesting examples of composition that you can learn from. For some, I selected paintings going back many centuries to underscore the duration of these tools from the masters.
There are three ways to use this book:
1.Start at #1, study each tool, and then create your own examples all the way through the book. Then you’ll have real experience with each of them.
2.Read through the book to get a feel for these and take notes on the ones that resonate with you. Once you’ve done this, the best action to reinforce the concepts presented is to immediately pull out your camera or phone and try to create with that composition “recipe.” Since the book is compact, I want you to carry it with you and put it right to use as you’re going out and photographing—it’s not meant to sit on a shelf and gather dust.
3.The third approach would be—just as if you were learning French cooking from Julia Child—looking through the book to find a recipe that catches your eye, and then simply cooking it. You might be challenged by one and put yourself to the test to see if you can make a credible version of it, and hopefully find you exceeded your expectations.
In any case, my goal is to broaden you skills as a photographer, no matter what level you are when you enter this process. I want to help you fulfill that deep urge that I spoke of to tell stories with your pictures and share them with pride as prints, exhibits, in books you create, on your social media, and elsewhere.
Then, start sharing your photos with us so we can see your results and hear your stories behind your images. To do so, use the hashtag #AYPClub (as I started with my previous book Advancing Your Photography (AYP).