Composition From A Professional Photographers Eye (How To Frame The Shot)

Creating interesting composition is going to be a key player in generating photos people actually want to look at. Being able to frame a picture that people actually want to look at will greatly boost your sales and bookings. Whether you’re shooting portraits, landscapes, or even product photography, you’re going to want to read this article!

Here are the 6 most common rules to creating an amazing composition in your photographs!

The Rule of Thirds means placing the subject off-center in the photo. It can also mean dividing the horizon so the sky only takes up one third and the foreground is the main focus or vice-versa. You can really get creative here and produce some amazing photos!

Here are some examples:

Notice how the main subject falls on one-third of the frame or the horizon is split only taking up one third. This is one of my favorite composition styles and I use it in about 80% of the photos I take.

Next up is filling the frame. I prefer to do this when taking portraits of animals but I’ll throw in some nature shots as well. Filling up the frame is simply taking out the negative space in the photo. Negative space is an area that serves no purpose, usually making the photo noisy and distracting from the main subject.

Here are some examples:

In these shots, you are simply canceling out the negative space. Photos often look more appealing when there is less going on in the frame.

*Noisy shots create unpleasant photos and they aren’t easy to look at*

Leading pull the eye to a certain area/subject in the photo. Sometimes the leading lines just point your eye to the center of the frame or into the vastness of the shot. Either way you set it up, you can never go wrong with a few leading lines.

Here are a few examples:

These two photos use the same composition technique but serve different purposes. The photo on the left brings your eye to the center of the frame which goes off into the distance and does not contain a subject. The shot on the right leads your eyes to the huge ship going under the Golden Gate Bridge. Both contain leading lines but serve different purposes.

Framing is a nice way of turning a boring photo into a well-composed piece of art. In order to frame, you must find an object in the foreground to act as a picture frame to the main subject.

Here are a few examples:

In the shot on the left, I used the flower to fill in some of the negative space in the shot. If I left the red flower out, the photo would look like it was missing something. On the right, I used the rocks to frame the interesting looking building. There was a lot of negative space with the water and mossy shoreline so I fixed it by changing the perspective.

Using reflections can seriously level-up your photos. With this technique, I like to put the horizon in the center of the frame. This tends to balance out the photo and make it more pleasing to the eye.

Using reflections, properly, can create interesting compositions for your photos. Try it out and see what you can come up with!

Simplicity is always appealing and easy to look at in a photo.

Here is an example of simplicity:

In this shot, I purposefully left out all distractions. By doing this, I created a simple photo that is easy to look at.

Well folks, there’s your 6 tips on how to set up cool composition!

Creating interesting photos comes with time. You should keep these rules in your back pocket to use when a photo seems boring. There are plenty of other composition rules out there but we’ll save those for another post!

I would greatly appreciate a like, comment, or share it with someone else who could benefit from this, if you found this article helpful. I love putting out this kind of content and seeing the results you all come up with. Love you all and hope you’re staying safe!

Cheers family!