This is the one thing that I think digital photography can’t teach you. When you shoot digital, it’s easy to take a million frames to see what works best. But when you shoot film, you have to think before you shoot. And when you think about it, balance, symmetry, negative space, all that good stuff makes a photo. Composition is what speaks to the viewer in the photograph. It’s what gives the viewer the emotion that you want them to get when looking at your photograph. What’s behind your subject, what’s in front, all of that matters.
The rule of thirds, for example, tells you to place interesting parts of your scene along one of the grid lines or where two grid lines meet to create a balanced image that doesn’t place all the interesting bits in the dead centre of the frame. There’s also the rule of negative space, or the rule of leading lines (like a footpath or line of tree shadows that lead the viewer’s eye into the picture), and even the rule of placing your subject off-centre to create a feeling of discomfort. And because you can’t view the photos you’ve taken, you have to trust you’ve applied all the rules correctly as you take each picture, and wait until they are developed to see how you did.
However, light is also an intrinsic part of composition, because it can also alter the appearance of the things you have arranged. For example, a cloudy day will produce soft light that helps reveal interesting textures and detail, while noon will produce deep shadows that add depth and help accentuate rhythm. A photographer who is aware of this will often visit a potential scene at different times of the day to see how the warm, soft light of the golden hour, for example, will add texture and rhythm to a landscape, and make it seem more alive.
And then there is the aspect of film photography that has nothing to do with technical rules: composition as instinct; as responding to a scene; as imbuing the moment with your inner-world as you photograph a solitary figure in the distance, or the geometry of a city street in the dead of night. It’s also a matter of working within the boundaries of the medium. Film can be limiting, but it encourages you to play around with the most unlikely of vantage points — lying on the ground, for instance, to elongate forms and misrepresent scale, or using anything in the foreground to create depth.
The end result of improving composition on film is that you will form a more intimate relationship with the medium. Each roll will be a declaration of how you see the world, in that very moment. When you start to improve your ability to take stronger photos, you will realize that it is not about technical perfection, but technical imperfection that allows the composition to shine through. This is a process that takes time, discipline and introspection. If you are willing to invest in your craft, you will start to take photos that are timeless. Photos that will ask viewers to take an extra moment to observe, ponder and enjoy.
