Composition

I love to geek out about composition. As an interior designer, it is one of my favourite things to create balance in a room with different objects.

The same rules apply with photography and it is a skill that Len achieves in his work rather organically - there is not a need to spend a long time (if any) cropping Len’s photos - he aligns his lens and his eye with composition in mind.

The image above to me is a great example of creating balance in a frame.

If we diagonally fold the image in half with our eye from top left to lower right corners we can see that the image is mostly divided in to two areas, sky and cliff.

The cliff has a lot of texture and is the “heavier’ part of the photo. The sky is lighter, but it takes up more space in the photo than land creating a type of asymetrical balance. The weight of the big sky is similar in weight to our eye than smaller land. The sun lighting up the rock face removes some weight from the cliff helping to balance the proportions further.

The trees in the image also do a little dance with each other. The tall thin lonely tree up top balanced by two fuller trees below, and a little puff of cloud in the sky to draw your eye upwards again.

Take the time to see where your eye travels to in this image. What emotion does it evoke? How does light and shade play a part in the overall balance? How would more sky effect the results, or more cliff? Lighter cliffs or darker?

When hanging on a wall what frame would suit? Heavy and chunky? or thin and fine?

What would we hang next to it ? Or if I placed an indoor plant or chair beside the image, would we place it to the left or right? How will that effect our overall space and our view of the image?

I could go on and on down this rabbit hole… but I’ll leave you with how I chose to style the photo in Lens Lounge…see you there!

Tash xxx