The Rules of Image Composition and Their “Why”

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

“What is your ‘why’?”

Two quotes: one, a famous quote by Ansel Adams; the other, a question someone once asked me, more as a general, life question.

So, since today starts a new month, and week, I’d like to get back to the basics of visual storytelling and look at the rules of image composition that often governs it through the above two quotes.

Also, for this particular exercise, I decided to include images from a work-in-progress series of self-portraits highlighting the rules of photo composition, in an attempt to address each of the two quotes mentioned above, and reiterated below:

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

That means that, as a word-count equivalent, an image would be about the length of a short story. And just as a story follows the rules of composition, a visual story follows the rules of visual composition.

“What is your ‘why’?”

That’s, perhaps, the basic, fundamental question of a self-portrait photo project or essay, a photo memoir, if you will. It forces us to take a good look within ourselves and find our ‘why’.

In terms of the ‘why’ of the rules of visual (or image) composition, we use them to:

• eliminate distractions
• subtly guide viewers’ eyes throughout the image frame to find/focus on the subject
• help photographers tell compelling, powerful, heartfelt visual stories
• transform visual storytelling into a form of art, the art of visual storytelling

The rules of image composition are meant to be understood, to know why, when and how to use (and sometime break) them, in order to tell visual stories in the most compelling and powerful of ways. The rules of image composition are meant not as boundaries, but as guidelines in visual storytelling.

So, with that, let’s begin with two rules of composition that oftentimes are used together: the rule of thirds and the rule of space.

The Rule of Thirds

The Rule of Space

Coming up:

Centering/Symmetry – Framing – Leading Lines – Diagonals – Patterns (repeating elements) and breaking the pattern – Scaling – Text & Color –

Black-and-White – Positive and Negative Space – Perspectives: vantage point

and

Combining Two or More Rules of Image Composition

note: while I sometimes share the backstories of some of the images, in this (and related) posts I attempt to only post image samples, not to explain, in detail, the rules of image composition; if you’re interested in learning more about and practicing choosing and using the rules in photography, feel free to check out these photography classes.

note: optional exercise, for those who might want to give it a try

-study images around yourselves; try to figure out what, why, and how many rules of composition were used to composite a particular visual story; ask yourselves, would you have used different rules? why or why not?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

As always, thanks for stopping by,

Alina Oswald