Wedding Photography Tips for Beginners – How to Compose your Photos, Part 2 of 4
Photography composition can be very challenging, and in wedding photography it can be even more complicated. In the first article I talked about horizontal and vertical format. In this article I am going to introduce a technique that can help you compose your images.
Once we have decided whether vertical or horizontal, we are on our way to composing a pleasing image. Everyone knows the basic rule not to put your subject in the dead center. So where do we put the wedding couple? If it is a portrait, and you are cropping pretty tight, sometimes you can put them just off center, and fill the rest of the frame with background that is hopefully pleasing to the eye, or at the very least background that is not distracting. If you are shooting 2.8, the background will be out of focus. You are then just looking for shapes or colors that compliment the wedding couple and the photo as a whole.
Now if you are not shooting a close-cropped portrait, but an image where you want to show an attractive background, things get a bit more complicated. There are many different theories for composing Landscape Photography, some even go all the way back to the paintings of the ancient Greeks. I suggest you look up “The Golden Mean”, and “The Rule of Two Thirds” and try them out in your photography and see if it fits your style. In this article I am going to introduce a simplified version of the rule of two thirds.
For this simplified version, imagine there are tic tac toe lines on your viewfinder, that is two lines across, and two down. The points of interest in your image should fall on one of the intersection point of these lines. As you can see there are four points of intersection/four possible points to put your elements of interest. With images with attractive landscapes you need to remember that your wedding couple is just one of the elements of interest in your photo. Lets continue with the lake and mountain peak example. Without the wedding couple, maybe the mountain peak as an element of interest would fall on one of these intersection points. If we insert the wedding couple, we may need to recompose this image so that it is they that fall on one of these points. Which point? Try different ones, and fill the frame with a composition that looks nice. Apply the same question “What am I gaining by having this other stuff in the frame?” So maybe the lake should be in frame, but a bunch of dead trees no.
I hope these techniques can help you in your wedding photography. In the next article in this series I am going to talk about another technique in composition. Thanks for reading!
About the Author
If you would like to see my wedding photography or images of Costa Rica please go to Kevin Heslin Wedding Photographer in Costa Rica
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