Photography composition basics: complementary unit

Right here we have got all the elements for what should be a really interesting picture. We’ve got beach huts which says seaside weekend off, we’ve got a nice cloudy car sitting here, we’ve got a tree, we’ve got a bit of an interesting background in the skies a bit cloudy, would be nicer if it was blue, but this composition isn’t working, is it? It’s kind of messy, uncomfortable and untidy. So how do we go about cleaning it up? Just using those movements of tilting up and down, moving up and down and shifting from side to side and twisting the camera we’re going to shift the elements around.

 

The first big problem is over here. It’s this blue bin. It’s a horrible looking thing and we need to get rid of it. Now I can just pick it up and hurl it over the hedge. Because I’d get in loads of trouble, what we need to do is to hide it. What are we going to do and how we’re going to do that? How we’re going to hide a bin? We’re going to hide it behind the car. If Jayne starts to make very gentle movements to her right, you can see that gap between the bin and the car is getting narrower and narrower. I’m keeping out of the shot so you can watch it happen. And in a moment it will disappear completely behind the car.

 

As you can see that’s looking better already, isn’t it? Now coming back into the picture, we’ve got the horizon, which is running pretty much through here, somewhere through the back window of the car. I’m not seeing anything wrong with that, it’s an interesting horizon, but as a little experiment let’s see what it would look like if we lost that horizon, if we either put it above the car or below the car. Do you remember how you do that? You move horizons by raising and lowering the camera. So first off let’s put the horizon above the car and to do that we need to raise the camera up in the air. This might be a bit jerky because Jayne’s not very tall and she’s lifting quite a heavy camera. I would take a picture of her doing it so you can see what is struggling to do to get that shot. Let me get out of it. As you can see, the horizon is now going above the roof of the car and we’ve lost the bin, so that is a lot better, but it’s a little bit disappointing because the top of this tree here is being chopped off. I find that really really annoying.

 

So how do we get the tree back into the shot and not have the horizon running through the back of the window? It’s another up and down movement, isn’t it? Remember the one down and tilt. So as Jayne moves the camera down and gets lower, so you can watch that horizon starting to go down below the car and disappear and as she tilts the camera up, you can see that’s much nicer, isn’t it? The horizon has now disappeared completely behind the car. It’s kind of down here somewhere. What we’re looking at this of June still hilly key things going off into the distance.

 

We got a tree, that’s looking nice in the shot; it’s kind of filling the frame. The car’s nice and dominant. The really irritating thing is that tree is growing out the car’s bonnet or wing mirror, somewhere around here. The trunk is sticking out of the car, that’s not very nice, is it? How we’re going to do that? Well now we’re going to move that tree. We need to create a gap between the front of the car here and that tree trunk, which is sticking up somewhere in this area here. We’re going to move the tree over here, it’s another sideways movement. I’m just going to take a quick picture so you can see where Jayne is to get that shot, which is including the top of the tree. So now let’s start to create a gap between the front of the car and that tree, and to do it Jayne’s going to move that way whilst keeping the camera low down. Down Jayne, down. It’s really hard, isn’t it? She’s walking along this weird sort of a crouch. Let me get out of the shot.

 

So just look at that for a moment. Now we’ve got the tree up in the corner, we’ve got the car; it’s all really lovely, isn’t it? But there’s something missing, isn’t there? What happened to our beach huts? Well we did the side to side movement, didn’t we? Now we need to rotate the camera that way just a little bit to make those gaps at the side change. There’s a gap beyond this bush over here which isn’t very useful. So, we want to get rid of that and bring in the beach huts so this bit of shrub here is just on the edge of the shot. Jayne turns the camera in that sort of motion towards the beach huts. I’ll get out of the shot. They have come back in.

 

As you can see that’s a much more pleasing composition. The car is he sort framed between the little shrub and the tree and the beach huts are going off into the distance to give it a bit of a dynamic. And all of that, every last piece of this composition at this picture, if we flick between this one and the first one when we set up here, there’s an enormous difference yet we have not moved anything. We haven’t changed the camera setting. All we’ve done is tilt the camera up or down or twist it side to side or go up and down with it. This is how you align elements of your pictures to get an interesting composition. Get out there and play with it and don’t worry if people laugh at you.