Digital Wedding Photography For Dummies

Composition: Using Different Techniques to Produce Stronger Images

Composition is a key element of good wedding photography. The term composition refers to the way you arrange and place all the elements within your frame and how they come together to create an idea. As with lighting, composition can determine the impact a photograph has on a viewer, so you need to understand how to arrange a picture to make it more visually appealing. I could write an entire book on the principles of composition, but in the following sections I just cover the basics.

The rules of composition are more like guidelines and can be broken if you feel that doing so would create a more visually compelling photo.

Trying the rule of thirds

The rule of thirds is the most widely known principle of photographic composition. To understand this concept, imagine that a tic-tac-toe grid is drawn across your viewfinder, breaking your image into thirds horizontally and vertically. The rule of thirds proposes that you should place your primary elements in a photograph along those vertical and horizontal lines. As an example, in Figure 3-12 the bride and groom are aligned along the right vertical line, and the horizon is at the top vertical line of the photograph.

50mm, 1/250 sec., f/5.6, 125

Figure 3-12: The rule of ...