This is the second part of a series on Learning to Compose.

Learning to Compose Part 2: Review

If you want to learn to compose, review.

This series of articles is not giving you rules for composition to use right now, but methods to learn how to be better at composition.

The truth is this: even though you can learn the rules of composition, the rules cannot compose images which have the mysterious quality we call ‘infinity’.

Hidcote Gardens, 18 July 2014, Df, 500mm mirror lens f8
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Infinity is when you want to keep coming back to look at an image. There is something about it which draws you.

An image may have infinity for you, who took it, or it may have infinity for other people with similar tastes, or it may have infinity for a wide public, even a world-wide public.

Not every image you create will win awards. Vincent van Gogh, famously, sold only one painting in his entire life. He was considered a failure. Today, he is considered one of the pivotal figures of Western Art.

But why didn’t people like van Gogh? Surely someone could have spotted that his work had a special something. The reality is that, in the 1880s, there were two ideas about art. Art was either hyper-realistic, ‘even better’ than the Old Masters, or else it was impressionistic. Manet and Monet ruled the avant gard. Van Gogh wasn’t either of these things. He painted with weird colours, often in weird proportions.

So what has this got to do with learning to compose?

The world is not looking for another Cartier-Bresson. It isn’t looking for an Anselm Adams. But it may (if not now, eventually) be looking for you. Van Gogh is considered one of the greatest because he kept on working at his style until he could say anything he wanted in it. Some of the earlier van Gogh’s don’t look like they were painted by van Gogh. He actually opened many doors that Surrealists, Dadaists and Cubists later went through. Any painting by van Gogh is going to be worth a bit (not that money defines value), but the multi-million van Goghs are the ones that look like they are van Goghs. The characteristic style, unique in its day.

You need to develop your characteristic style, and the way to do this is by looking at what you did, and evaluating it.

Evaluating is not about trying to decide what your best is. ‘Best’, in the sense of winning awards, or getting an accolade from friends or a teacher, or a thousand Facebook likes, may just mean that you’ve imitated a popular style. Evaluating is about seeing why you like it.

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. Three hundred of those words are what the picture is about: subject and theme, where subject is what it’s a picture ‘of’, in the way that a librarian would catalogue it, and theme is your particular take on it. Another three hundred of those words are about the pleasingness of the colour or tone combinations, and the general photographic mastery—they are, in other words, what makes it nice to look at. But four hundred of those words are about infinity, brought about by the way in which you combine all the different elements into a compelling image.

Let’s look at a couple of pictures of water.

Birmingham Botanical Gardens, 2 April 2005, D100, 80-200 f2.8 @f6.7 200mm
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River Avon, Barton, Warwickshire, 7 November 2010, D3, 70-200 f2.8 @200 mm and cropped
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I’m not suggesting you should look at these and go “wow, those are the greatest pictures of water I have ever seen”. They’re important to me because it’s a subject I’ve come back to again and again: freezing water in time using a long focal length lens and wide aperture. I’ve sat for hours besides pools and fountains capturing them endlessly.

Interestingly, the one which I think is better I only rated at 3 stars when I first rated them.

You can see the evolution. The first one is nice. But, if I had the choice, I would have used a much longer focal length.

How long? In the second, 200 mm, but cropped for an even higher effective focal length.

But the second is less good than the first, because, although it freezes the water better, it lacks a subject. It’s just a confused amount of water—perhaps ideal for the background to a book cover (and, indeed, it’s been used as such), but not an image in its own right.

So let’s go to image three, taken some time after reviewing one and two.

Hidcote Gardens, 18 July 2014, Df, 500mm mirror lens f8
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Caption: Hidcote Gardens, 18 July 2014, Df, 500mm mirror lens f8

This one really is sharp. It’s photographed with a 500mm mirror lens, hence the ring-shaped bokeh. This one has infinity. At least, it does for me.

I share this, because I had been reflecting on images 1 and 2 for some time. As it happens, both of them have been used commercially. Image 3 has not (yet). But image 3 is my favourite. They also reflect an evolution, with approximately five years between each. Now, you may say, that isn’t much improvement for 15 years, but, then, it’s a subject I only come back to occasionally.

Before we leave water, how about this dark, brooding image. You have to look at it twice before you realise that it actually is water. This one isn’t part of my water ‘style’—not yet. But it may open doors to something else.

Unknown location, 7 August 2008, D3, 500mm mirror lens f8
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When I shoot, I load everything onto a NAS Drive and catalogue with NeoFinder. I used to use Media Pro, but Phase One no longer supports it. Digikam might work better for you, as it has more features, but it’s also a bit flakey.

Hackfall, North Yorkshire, 17 August 2010, 24-70 f2.8 @32mm f15
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Antwerp, Belgium, 11 August 2015, Df 50mm f1.8 @f7.1
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I like to go through and assign star ratings to things early on, especially if there are a lot of similar images. But I also come back to them regularly. My catalogue has 192,877 separate items, though almost half are JPEGs of the RAW file, as I usually shoot RAW+JPEG. Using Media Pro or NeoFinder, I can whizz through them in a few minutes. I do try to catalogue, but cataloguing is really about subject matter and place. Star ratings help me find the ‘best’ images, but, often, when I come back, I actually pick other images than the ones I originally starred. I tend to star on picture quality (focus, colour, shutter-sharpness). On review, it is often the less perfect images which speak to me more—not because imperfection speaks, but because it isn’t always easy to have the inspired capture and the technically perfect capture at the same time.

In the two examples, I worked a bit on the exposure in the first, but in the second I left it ‘straight from the camera’. This is an image which is not improved by adjusting the balance of the sky to throw more attention onto the subject. With this kind of image, the eye needs to find the subject second, not first—something I learned by considering the first image for some time.

There are times when I will then go back to the same place to try to recreate the same shot, or try to do the same shot in a different place or with different people. But there are also times when I say: that’s the shot. It may be somewhat out of focus, or weirdly tilted, or have to be cropped because something is dangling in front of the lens, but that is the unrepeatable shot.

Compositional perfection trumps technical perfection any day. What trumps composition? Concept. But, often, we have to work on the compositional technique over a period of days, weeks or years before the right subject and theme come up.

Consider this picture of a terrapin. During the beginning of lockdown, I stalked these terrapins for months. Someone told me that the terrapins had attacked the coots, that I was also photographing, and that they were invasive species that ought to be destroyed. I spent hours (in total) watching terrapins circling the coot’s nest. But later, I learned that they actually were an indigenous species, unlike the Canada and Egyptian Geese that people loved (cute chicks), and that they ate all kinds of things, but not typically birds eggs. They liked climbing onto the coots’ nest when it wasn’t occupied to bask in the sun.

Zaventem, Belgium, 18 June 2020, Df 500mm f8, crop
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So, after about five hundred pictures, I came to this one. This expresses what I learned: terrapins don’t care about coots. They don’t care about humans. They are millions of years older than us. If you want to know about dragons, look in to the eye of a terrapin (you could do the same with a crocodile, but the risks are higher).

Again, this benefits from considerable review. Understanding what I was shooting changed the content of the image.



Here is the uncropped version.
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Is it as good? I don’t think so. There’s so much out-of-focal-plane terrapin that the actual facial expression is lost. But my first reaction (and the one that got onto Facebook) was the whole terrapin. After all, we want to see the whole animal. But the whole animal picture is unremarkable. The face on its own is — at least to me — extraordinary.

—

Implicit in any review is playing around with at least some of the images in post-processing. Very few images are perfect as they come out of the camera. The camera only has one shape, in two orientations. Many images benefit at least from cropping so that the format of the picture manages the composition of the image itself.

But how much further should you go?

Tastes have changed over the last few years. Ten years ago I was forever sharpening eyes and softening skin. Portraiture could even change facial characteristics, though I never went so far. These days, unless the post-processing was part of my original conception, I leave it at only doing what could have been done in a traditional darkroom. I don’t clone, I don’t heal, I don’t use automatic content replacement software.

That’s my aesthetic, at the moment. A part of the benefit of review is establishing your aesthetic. You can go back to previous generations of images and say “what would that have been like if I had developed it using my aesthetic today?” If it’s better, then that justifies my aesthetic. But what if it’s worse? It could just mean that I am no longer photographing in that idiom, but it could also meant that my current aesthetic is a dead end. Review goes both ways: sometimes you realise you are developing, and sometimes you discover you’re in a rut.

——

My advice is as follows:

1. If you don’t have one, get a DAM — a Digital Assets Management system like Digikam or Neofinder. Both can be used free of charge. Catalogue all of your images electronically, at least so that they are loaded in the database. It may take a week of computer time, but it’s worth it
2. Review your images regularly. While you’re waiting for new images to copy to your hard drive, review your old images.
3. Ask yourself hard questions:

• what is my style?
• how is it developing?
• are there things I used to think were cool but don’t now?
• is it making for better or worse images?
• how do I go forwards?

Author: Martin Turner

Link: https://www.nikonians.org/reviews/le...compose-review

 

Thanks again Mark for sharing this info!