Composition

Composition

The term composition within photography revolves around the organisation of the photograph itself, exploring the ideas of perspective through various lenses, particular viewpoints, crossed with the selection and arrangement of the subject and its background area. From David Präkel's reading of 'Basic Photography: Composition', he states that composition is '...giving form by putting together or combining various elements, parts or ingredients.' The correct composition of a photograph gives the image a much more interesting viewpoint , with the focal subject becoming clear. An example of this is of David Präkel's projects exploring composition titled 'The Sailer Boy'.

Above is an example is how composition is used with photography to improve an image entirely. This photograph above, 'The Sailer Boy' was captured by Präkel himself and used as a example to show the improvement. Within the first smaller shot, the sailer is captured within the frame surrounded by another various sailers, but is not showing any difference to the other sailers, not indicating to the audience that he is the main focus, apart from wearing a white uniform. Whereby the larger second photograph explores this technique of composition, considered 'composed and considered.' As stated similarly above the viewpoint has changed slightly, creating a greater focus on the sailer boy alone, helped along by the use of the zoom of the camera. The background has also become blurred, cropping out the other previous sailers in the background, making it clear that focus is entirely on the young sailer alone. Präkel uses various techniques of viewpoint, depth of field and focus to create this composed image, creating a much more engaging photograph than the first. It encourages the audience or reader to highly consider the techniques of composition with capturing photographs as it gives a higher quality image and the focus becomes clear almost instantly in most cases.