Ian Furniss Photography » Blog Archive » Composition and Purpose

Composition and Purpose

Rules have never been one of my favourite subjects, unless of course it’s the criticising of them. Maybe it’s my rebellious nature, maybe it’s just that adhering to them has always struck me as a lazy or mindless way out. Either way, there are many times that things like the rule of thirds have no place and need to be ignored.

One such instance is in the image above. It was shot whilst flying over the Alps and says everything it needs to say about that, but compositionally speaking it doesn’t follow the rules. The primary reason for that is that it was shot purely as a narrative shot and for my own sense of nostalgia and its use is for situations like the above where I may want to include text alongside it. If you shoot for stock that is something you definitely need to consider. It’s ok firing off hundreds of shots of random things that may be useful, but if there’s no room to put text without wrecking the image, then it’s a lot less likely to make a cover. Magazines need somewhere to put their name, they need places to advertise the articles inside, and quite simply, where are they going to put them if in doing so they hide the whole story of what the image is about?

The same applies to any image you shoot and before considering things such as the rule of thirds you need to consider why you’re taking the shot. A print image will usually allow you to consider only the aesthetics of the image or the story you want to tell in which case you can pretty much shoot things as you see them. Having said that, I will often zoom out or take a couple of steps back if i’m using a wide-angle lens and think I may need to allow for geometric distortion in post-processing. Ideally though the common sense approach applies and if you can get it right in camera that will always be the best way. There’s little or no point in spending extra cash for more megapixels if you then discard them by cropping your images.

Sometimes things can be out of your control and choices that you’d like to make aren’t possible. One such time was in the shot above which in accordance with my principles of honesty I have to say has been ‘done to death!’ in photoshop. I liked the combination of yellows and blacks. the rigid lines and angles, the woman sat reading her book with the empty table and chair opposite. In my mind I knew I wanted to shoot from the side rather than head on but there was no way to do that and avoid a mass of foliage and other obstructions. Getting in close would have been one option, but at that point a wider lens would have distorted things and given a different feel entirely. The only answer therefore was Photoshop and the original is below (I may yet decide to lose the foreground flowers as well but i’m currently undecided).

A little earlier in the day i’d walked past another building and was struck immediately by the lines and colours that gave a very rigid and mathematical feel to my thoughts of composition, and this was contrasted by a lack of formality in the crumbling plaster work. A great recipe for an image!

As much as the image above has captured the things I felt at the time, there is also a part of me that feels there is something missing and perhaps a bike or flower, a small table or something similar would also be a good addition to the shot. Mathematically it’s fine, but ultimately personal preference kicks in. In many ways I actually prefer the next version where a passer-by got in the shot just as I was taking it.

He’s the size of a doorway so I wasn’t going to complain(!) but by blocking the doorway he also introduces a nice contrast that breaks the rigidity of what was previously a predominantly clinical image. Now, it speaks to me of my own desire to break with conformity and structure and I prefer that. It suits me better. It was a complete accident and I may go back and reshoot the image as a more deliberate ‘accident’, but the point is simply that structure or composition is like everything else and best determined by what you want to say rather than by adhering to rules that are set in stone. To be creative implies being free and that will always be more soul-inspiring than repeating a formula.