Tag Archives: Basic composition techniques

How to Effectively use Juxtaposition in Your Photos

Introduction to Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition is easy to do when you know how, but isn’t a particularly common occurrence in everyday photography, so that increased the degree of difficulty. You can use it to varying degrees of effectiveness depending on how obvious you make it, and it’s a really good way of making what could have been a boring photo into something much more interesting.

What is Juxtaposition?

Juxtaposition happens when there is two or more elements in a scene that either contrast each other, or one element contributes towards another to create an overall theme. It’s all about making the viewer wonder why we chose a certain viewpoint for the photo, and why we decided it was good enough to share with others. To create a point of juxtaposition, the photo must have at least two elements in the photo that contains strong visual weight, so that the viewer looks at both at the same time and comes to their own conclusion about their purpose in the photo.

What makes juxtaposition such an interesting compositional tool is that it’s largely based on chance appearances of two elements, although it can be forced at times. If you have a look at the photo below, you’ll see a drunk man walking past a sign offering a discount for double measures of alcoholic drinks. If you’ve read my post on visual weight, you’ll know that the eyes of a face and writing have very strong visual weight, so we tend to notice both equally.

This use of juxtaposition takes a rather boring photo of a drunk man walking and makes it much more interesting. This photo happened by chance so it’s a little bit rarer, but it could have been easily forced, which we’ll get to later on.

When you take two elements that reinforce the theme of the photo, it instantly become a much stronger photo. The photo below was shot in Croatia where it was very hot so the two men had their tops off, while putting wristbands together for a festival, but I noticed that they were sitting under a painting of a heart, so I took a photo. The juxtaposition was no accident, I framed the photo because of the painting, and I went unnoticed when I took the photo so that they didn’t look up and draw the visual weight elsewhere. The idea was that the viewer would look at the heart and then notice the two topless men and see the correlation between the two, which has proven that it works.

Some photos with juxtaposition require context to work, so by looking at the photo below, you might not see any, but if you were to see the title of the album that it was in, then you would have. This photo was taken at Gay Pride, so instantly the rainbow in the photo takes on a whole new meaning. This sort of juxtaposition can work really well in the right circumstances, but you need to make sure that the viewer has the most basic, but relevant information to go along with it.

When you start to include contrasting elements in a scene, then it can get a little bit more complicated, and this is often where you’ll see forced juxtaposition. The plane flying above the Lincoln Memorial building below evokes very obvious feelings in a post 9/11 world, and when you consider that the plane is very low to the ground, those feelings are heightened. Again, this was a chance occurrence, but I knew what I was doing when I took the photo and because of the obvious juxtaposition, people tend to spend a lot longer looking at it.

Forcing Juxtaposition

This is surprisingly easy to do, but I tend to find it quite obvious and not very effective. It’s one thing to know that juxtaposition is taking place when you’re taking a photo, but it’s another to go looking for it. Anyone can sit outside a big bank and wait for a homeless person to walk past to take a photo, that’s just a matter of time, not skill. The more you know about composition, the more you understand a scene when you’re looking at it, and it will provide you with the knowledge to guide you into taking a good photo.

When you look at the photos used in this post, the most subtle uses of juxtaposition (such as a two men sitting under the heart), the stronger the photo is, and the more obvious (such as the drunk man), the less the effect has on the photo. And by this I’m talking about the amount of time we spend looking at a photo.

How to Choose Horizon Placement in Composition

Why Horizons

When a frame is being divided by a single, dominant line, it’s more often than not, a Horizon, as they’re fairly common in outdoor photography, particularly landscapes. If the photo is of nothing particularly interesting, then usually this line becomes be the dominant part of the photo for the way in which it separates the frame.

Where to Place the Horizon and Why?

Firstly, I think it’s important to realise where you probably don’t want to place the line, and that’s directly in the middle of the frame. That’s not to say that you should definitely not do it, but it does have a tendency to divide the photo in half and create an uneven photo, with the contrast between the two halves making it look more like two separate photos. Exactly where you place the horizon is completely up to you, but it helps to remember that if a feature of the photo does nothing to improve it, then it has no place in the photo to begin with. Here’s a photo where the horizon has divided the frame in two. Notice that it doesn’t really favour either half.

If you take the horizon and place it slightly lower in the frame, you regain a feeling of stability, which balances out the photo better. You also remove the feeling of division and the whole photo starts to come together as a single image, made up of multiple elements, rather then just two photos stuck together. Have a look at the photo below to see what I mean.

If you were to decide that the top half of the frame was much more interesting than the bottom, then you may want to adjust your composition so that the horizon is a lot lower in the frame. The photo below was taken from a tower in London on a rainy day, with empahsis on the sky. The cityscape adds an interesing texture to photo, but holds much less visual weight. It serves to make the man made city look small in comparison to the powerful sky and weather. This is one of the many interesting, extra feelings which can be evoked when you consider the importance of different aspects of a photo, and asjust your composition accordingly.

The photo below was taken directly after the photo above and focuses largely on the ground, rather than the sky. This photo contrasts greatly with the one above because it no longer evokes the same feelings, and instead focuses more on the colour and lines in the city. Your eyes are naturally drawn up the photo from the colour of the trees and houses at the bottom of the frame to the sharp and jagged nature of the buildings by the sky at the top. An equally interesting photo, but for different reasons, all because of the decisions made over the placement of the horizon. Importantly though, you’ll see that both images are stronger than the original image which cut the photo in half.

If you want to include both the sky and the ground, but don’t want to cut the photo in half then I recommend changing the orientation to portrait. Again, you’re going to probably want to avoid placing the horizon in the middle of the frame, but the decision is up to you. I personally feel that the composition in the photo below is stronger than any of the photos above as it includes the most interesting parts of each photo. The weather had changed slightly between photos, meaning that there was less uninteresting sky in the photo, and that certainly helped towards finding the perfect balance between sky and ground. It’s all about thinking it through and experimenting with what works for you.

High Horizon

Now that we’ve discovered why you may want to include a high or a low horizon, let’s have a look at some examples. The high horizon in this photo was an obvious choice as the sky was particularly plain and uninteresting during the evening in which I took this photo. Realising this, I made a special effort to find somewhere that I could include the foreground a little bit more to strengthen my photo. I found these strong and jagged rocks, which contrasted nicely with the sky, while blending in with the colour of the photo.

Below is an extreme example of a high horizon and I chose to include it because it focused the interest onto the subject and foreground below. It made it look as if the visual weight of the subject forces the camera down, while at the same time, kept the photo stable by remaining straight across the top of the frame. There’s a lot going on in the lower half of this photo and the inclusion of the sky would have distracted from this.

Low Horizon

Photos of clouds from below can be pretty boring and rely heavily on being ‘pretty’ for getting attention, but when you raise your angle, the clouds rely more on their shape and form to attract viewers. Because I had a higher vantage point and shape of the clouds were particularly interesting, I wanted to include as much of them as possible and this meant using a lower horizon. I included just enough of the ground to make the colour interesting and complimentary to the colour of the sky, while focusing most of the viewers attention towards the subject, which were the clouds.

This is an example of a very low horizon this time, and I chose to take the photo this way, not because I wanted to emphasis the rather uninteresting sky, but because I wanted to focus on the dominance of the building. With the horizon that low, the feeling of balance is lost and that draws your attention towards the bold building which stands on top of it. By removing many other potential features from the frame, you focus the attention onto one specific point – the building.

How to use Triangles to Improve Your Composition

Introduction to Triangles

Triangles are in almost everything we see, in one way or another, it’s just a case of distinguishing them and knowing what to do with them. They make great compositional tools as they’re easy to make, manipulate, and are remarkably common.

Triangles are a great way of combining different compositional techniques such as lines and paths and using them to create a more interesting part of a photograph, but the best part about using a triangle is their ability to make a photo feel stable or unstable.

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Why use Triangles

It’s not really a case of why you should be using triangles in your composition, because you’ll come to realise that the inclusion of triangles is inevitable, it’s more about why you should be using them properly.

Triangles are a great way of grouping together three points of a photograph and organising them so they portray a certain feeling such as stability, agression, instability, etc. When you understand this, you can use them as invisible features of a photo which evokes a strong feeling to the viewer.

How to Create a Triangle

So long as you have 3 points of vague interest in a photo that aren’t on the same line, then you can easily create a triangle. It’s not about having 3 clear lines that join up in a photo, that would be too obvious, it’s about grouping points of interest.

If you take a look back through some of your photos, you’ll probably realise that a lot of the photos you’ve taken contain triangles, but whether you’ve used them to their maximum potential is another thing.

Implied Triangles

One of the most common types of triangles that you’ll come across is the implied triangle. As you’ll rarely see physical triangles in photography, the shape is almost always implied, and it’s done so usually without the viewer even noticing it. The more you know about composition, the easier it is for you to start deconstructing what makes a photo good and using that to make your own photos better.

The photo below for example, has only 1 physical line, but the shape of the roof and the angle of the buildings sides and stairs make us see a full triangle.

Having the base of the triangle at the bottom and apex at the top of the photo make the triangle appear very stable, much like a pyramid, and it’s often found in architecture photography. When you start to change the angles inside the triangle and change the rotation of the triangle, the photo starts to appear less stable, with the extreme having the apex at the bottom of the photo, but we’ll get to that in a bit. Have a look at the photo below as a less stable triangle – notice I used the submerged breakwater as one of the edges of the triangle.

Converging Triangles

Whether they’re straight or diagonal lines, when they go far enough into the distance, you start to see the lines converge and that is where you’ll start to see a lot of triangles. These triangles can appear in the frame or outside the frame, it’s just a matter of the distance you have to work with. The winder the angle of the lens, the more likely you’ll be to have the lines converge inside the frame.

Often photos converge outside the frame when you’re shooting photos of buildings and their height make the lines converge towards the top, but it wouldn’t make sense to include the space that the lines may have converged if they had carried on.

When the lines converge within the frame it’s much easier to see and often you’ll find that it happens more than once. Notice how we’re only really working with 2 actual lines in the photo? That’s because you can also use the frame of the photo as one of the sides of the triangle, like I’ve done below.

Unstable Triangles

If you want to create an unstable feeling in a photograph then a quick and easy way to do this is to include an upside down triangle, or at least a triangle with a weird rotation. Not only have I used a triangle with its apex at the bottom of the photo, the ground of my photo isn’t level either, which adds to the feeling and also makes new triangles appear where they wouldn’t have been, had there been a square bottom half to the photo. Triangles like this are excellent at drawing the attention to something seemingly insignificant or bland and making the photo more interesting.

3 Figure Shots

You’ll commonly see triangles without even realising in in 3 figure shots where there’s multiple subjects. Take the photo below for example, there’s 3 subjects, each with the same visual weight which initially leads you to look at each subject for the same amount of time, before going back to whatever drew you in the most. This sort of shot works well, but be careful about trying to force this, or when you’ve got 3 subjects which are at the same height and heads appear in a line, it won’t work as well.

Focus Attention

Triangles act in a similar way to arrows when the apex converges at a certain point as your eyes are drawn down their edges and onto the subject in question. This is arguably quite similar to what diagonal lines do, only this involves 2 or more physical lines and 1 implied line. Have a look a the photo below and notice that your attention is drawn to the subject’s sunglasses as that is where the apex of the triangle converges.

You can also use multiple triangles to create this effect, you just need to be careful where you’re pointing them. I used the triangular shape of the rock edges to direct the attention onto my models legs below, but I feel that that ultimately took away from her face.

Interesting Background

I wanted to include this extra little section at the bottom to try and analyze what I like about the photo below. I took this a few weeks ago and it’s one of my favourite photos to date, but it’s hard to know exactly why unless you delve a little deeper. The lighting is good, the colour and grain is spectacular, but most importantly, I feel it was the inclusion of so many diagonal lines that created a large number of triangles in the frame (in the background in particular) that made it so good. I count at least seven triangles which kept my staring at the photo for ages. Subtle differences in angle and viewpoint can make a huge difference to your photos. Triangles 10221 How to use Triangles to Improve Your Composition

How to Use Visual Weight in Composition to Influence Your Viewers

What is Visual Weight and How Can I Use it?

I’ve mentioned visual weight a few times now, but I’ve never actually gone into detail about what it actually is; it’s a lot more then just the size of an object in a scene. Visual weight is determined by the way that we look at the photo and what we see first and spend the most amount of time looking at. If you understand the visual weight of different objects in the scene, you can use your knowledge effectively to encourage the viewer to see the photo in a certain way.

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Which Objects Provides the Most Weight?

Eyes

The single most effective way of adding visual weight to a part of a photo that you want your viewer to look at, is to include eyes. The first thing the viewers will see is the eyes and then, if they’re looking away from the camera, where the subject is looking, which is a great way for forcing the viewer to look at multiple parts of a photo in order. Consider the photo below as an example; notice how your eyes briefly glance over the game before alternating between the spectators at the top of the frame.

Now look at the photo again, only this time with the spectators cropped out; the majority of your time spent looking at the photo is looking at the toppling tower to the left of the frame and the players reaction to it. This is vitally important to remember when composing your shots, as the subject can be greatly changed by the addition of a few sets of eyes. Without the eyes, there’s a lot less to look at, which means the viewer has spent less time on the photo.

Size, Colour & Contrast

Of course, size and colour plays a large part in drawing the viewers attention to a certain part of the frame, as they tend to stand out the most from afar. When an object occupies a good amount of the frame, it can’t be ignored, but is a lot less subtle then the addition of a pair of eyes. When this large object is also a bright or contrasting in colour, then the tendency to stand out is greater as it appears to be out of place. Consider the photo below for example, the size and container on the left stands out greatly, and actually weighs out to be roughly the same visual weight of the dog and her eyes. This in turn balances out the photo, which makes a relatively dull photo more interesting as more time is spent looking at it.

Writing

Writing in photos hold a great amount of weight as the viewer is immediate suspicious of what exactly the photographer wants them to see. This can be very useful, but at the same time, a bit obvious. If you were to use writing purely for the shape and colours, then it’s best to use a foreign language. The photo below is a good example of this; when you compare ‘SOLD OUT’ with ‘JE RASPRODAN’, it’s easy to see which holds the most interest with the viewer.

I recently received a comment from a reader where they mentioned captioning photographs, and I should weigh in my 2 cents: I recommend you don’t caption your photos at all. Text in (or in this case, alongside) photos have a visual weight that encourages your viewer to think in a certain way, and while this is usef

ul inside a photo, when you add a caption, you take away a part of the viewers imagination. The photo below is actually a lot stronger because the writing was included inside the photo, and not alongside it.

Cuteness, Horror, Erotic, Novelty

We’ve covered what I consider to be the three top weighing objects that you can include in a photo, but there’s still plenty that will attract the viewer to certain parts of the photo. Everyone seems to love looking at photos, and there’s billions of them out there, which all serve a different purpose. Some good photography may have you engrossed for hours, spotting new parts that you’d missed before, whereas others are designed to produce a few seconds of entertainment, which is often where you’ll find these sorts of weights.

That’s not to say that the points covered in the subheading can’t be used for other purposes, because they can be used very effectively if done properly, they just happen to found in the majority of images sites that offer light hearted entertainment also. Have a look at the photo below and before you scroll down to the text below, ask yourself what stands out?

For most, it’s the couple about to kiss in the top right hand corner. This is because I observed the rule of thirds, contrasted the movement with the man’s relatively still positioning and because of the slightly erotic nature of what was going on. As always, these techniques are to be used in moderation.

Multiple Points of Interest

I’ve used the photo below many times on this blog, and that’s because it’s one of my favourites because of the colouring, texture, eyesight and visual weight. Had I cropped the photo to the girl’s face then there would be a single point of interest that carried all of the visual weight, but because I was further away, I was able to add multiple points. The first thing we notice is the girls face, and her eyesight brings you over to the man sitting on the right, with his eyesight bringing you back to the girl. Because we’ve already looked at her, you start to notice the large arm of the sofa which seems to be almost intruding on the photo. Because of the size and colour and the the effect it’s having on the primary subject, it carries a lot of visual weight.

CNV00017 How to Use Visual Weight in Composition to Influence Your Viewers

A Note to Finish

What I mean to say is that the more subjects or objects you include in the photo, the more complicated the composition can become, which in turn, can make the photo more interesting. The biggest thing to take away from this article is that size doesn’t matter, it’s the actual content that makes the biggest difference, and the more subtle you make your photographic composition, the more interesting the results can become. Hope this has helped to clears things up for any of you wondering.

Balance in Composition – Everything You Need to Know

How to use Balance in Photography

Balance is at the base of every composition; it determines whether the photo is pleasing and harmonious to look at, or rather uncomfortable and unresolved. If you look at balance in a literal sense, a very basic analogy comes to mind which is that or the weighing scales.

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If you divide the photo in half with a fulcrum in the middle, you can place objects in different parts of the scene to make the photo appear balanced or unbalanced. When a photo is largely symmetrical, it’s easy to see the balance, but obvious balance is somewhat boring. I like the photo below, but if it relied purely on the image’s balance, it would have been boring.

Along with placement, we have size and visual weight, which can balance the photo, depending on the positioning. For example, you may have a small and a large object, which would be impossible to balance at equal distances from the center of the photo, but if you place the smaller object to the far edge of the frame and the larger object slightly off center then the balance becomes a lot better resolved – just like it would be in real life with actual weights on a scale.

If you compare the visual weights of the 2 primary subjects in the photo below from reader Timothy Sax, you’ll see that the slightly off-center subject is counter balanced by their smaller shadow being at the edge of the photo. You also have the use of converging and horizontal lines which help to provide a solid base for the photo, which in turn provides stability and balance.

Balance is good to have in some photos, but if you want to make your images a little more interesting, unbalanced photos help to attract the viewers attention. Unusual placement of a single object, dynamic tension, and single leading lines all help to unbalance a photo as they produce a feeling of unresolved tention like in the photo below.

Balance is of course much more complicated then just weighing out a couple objects in a photo, as it’s uncommon for you to actually see two objects sitting on a solid base, outside of architecture, symmetry and reflections. The weighing scale analogy is good for explaining the basics, but when it comes to the majority of photography, it’s much more complicated and there’s a lot less rules.

I would consider the image below mostly balanced because even though the main visual weight of the subject is to the left of the frame, the vertical lines imply a solid base and the multiple horizontal lines create a zig zag of natural tension, which act as a weight for the right side of the photo.

Balanced or Unbalanced?

Balanced or unbalanced photos are determined in the eyes of the viewer, and it’s up to the photographer to decide how they want the viewer to perceive the photograph. Simply put, deciding between balance and unbalanced is the same as deciding between tension and harmony, and each degree of choice has its different uses. We’ve already looked at balanced photos, so lets have a look at unbalanced photos and their uses.

If you’re purposely looking to add dynamic tension to your photos then you’re going to automatically find that the tension itself acts as a techn

ique for unbalancing the photo. In the photo below it would be hard to find the center of gravity as the image goes outwards from the photo in so many contrasting directions, and the small detail in the top lefthand corner of the photo is even more distracting.

You may also want to unbalance a photo in order to direct the viewers attention to a certain part of the photo, but this should be done with caution. If you chose too unusual of a position for you subject, then the unbalanced technique that you’re using becomes very obvious and in doing so, much less effective.

If you have a look at my photo below, you’ll notice that the balance is definitely leaning towards the left of the photo, but that leads your eye to wonder what’s in the rest of the photo which draws your interest towards the pier and the people on the beach, which made my photo more interesting, and increased the time my viewer was looking at the photo.

If you take the same effect and exaggerate it a little bit more with the use of a shallow depth of field and less posible subjects, it can be hard to tell whether the BBQ is the subject or potentially the tyre swing in the background. This unbalanced technique can change the subject from the obvious to the seemingly insignificant by sparking the curiosity of the viewer and making them want to look at something that they think they’re not supposed to be looking at.

Lastly, you should consider the positioning of your subjects in terms of height within the frame. In the photo below, the fireworks seem to balance out the weight of the stage. Even though the stage is clearly a lot wider, the overall size of the fireworks and their vertical positioning creates a downforce for the left side of the image. Different composition techniques have different effects on the visual weight of objects in your scene, so the better you understand them, the better your balance will be.

A Note to Finish

As photographers, we spend a great deal of time creating awesome images, using different compositional techniques that the viewer is unlikely to pick up on. You may find it frustrating at times that they’re not seeing all your hard work, but that’s not what’s important, it’s the creation of a photo that you and your peers know is good, that is.

The more aware you are of the effects of balance on your photos, the better your photography will be, so it pays to think about how you want to portray your image before you pick up your camera. Degrees of balance is at the heart of every photo and can’t be ignored so use it wisely, and remember, that any technique, if used to excess, is going to lose its worth.

How Vertical Lines can Improve our Composition

Why you Should know About Vertical Lines

Vertical lines come right after horizontal lines in importance and that’s for a single reason – the way our eyes view an image. Our eyes scan a photo from left to right horizontally and will pick up horizontal lines first, and because of this, vertical lines are excellent at complimenting horizontal lines with their perpendicular, stopping nature when they intersect. This is a great technique to adding tension into a photo.

They have a very important place in photography and art for the way they make us perceive a photo, and this can be many things, depending on what the photo is of. A photo of a vertical tree may make us perceive growth, uplifting and a sense of something spiritual like in the photo below, whereas a building would give a sense of dominance, power, performance and stability such as in the photo below the trees. It’s all about what’s in the photo and how it interacts with whatever else is in the frame.

Portrait

The simplest way of presenting a photo with a strong sense of vertical lines is to shoot in portrait orientation. The vertical sides being closer together than in landscape accentuate the vertical form and encourage the viewer to see the lines present in a photo. Keeping vertical lines close to the sides like in the photo below help to encourage the comparison between the lines in the photo and the vertical frame.

Depth

It’s easy to create a sense of depth in a photo by using vertical lines and taking 2 or more objects that we know to be the same (or roughly so) height and placing one further away from the other. As we well know, this makes the vertical line appear smaller, but in doing so provides us with a sense of depth. Have a look at the trees in the photo below and the bridge in the photo below it which demonstrate this.

Perspective

Perspective has a very obvious effect on photos and using different focal lengths can have a huge effect on how lines will be seen in a photo. Up close, the effects are obvious, like the photo of the trees in the woods above; the further away the lines get, the closer together they appear to be. If you’re much further away, using longer focal lengths, the objects appear closer together and therefore more straight by comparison. Have a look at my comparison below that I took from my tutorial on focal length to fully understand this.

Positioning

A vertical line in a frame can appear to cut a frame in half if it’s placed in the center of the photo like in the one below. This can be a useful technique, but for the majority of the time, I find that it’s not how I want my photo to look as it adds tension to a photo while taking away interest. If you place the subject of the photo slightly to one side like in the photo below the one below, it makes the photo more interesting.

Vertical Lines in Lanscape Photos

Below is a great example of how vertical lines within a horizontal frame change the feeling from vertical lines continuing vertically out of the frame to continuing on a horizontal plane, out of the frame. Because you don’t get to see where the lines stop repeating, you get a sense of infinity and that the photo couldn’t contain it, along with a sense of stability from the intersecting horizontal line.

When there are multiple vertical lines in a frame, it’s best to shoot in lanscape to contain them all and to give a sense of depth and repetition in the photo. If this photo been shot in portrait, it would have lost its sense of repetition and drawn the eye up and down the photo rather then left to right.

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and we’ll get back to you.

Improve Your Composition with The Rule of Thirds

Why you Should be Using the Rule of Thirds

This is one of the most common composition techniques around and it’s that way for a reason; it works. Photos that are correctly composed using the rule of thirds create depth and interest in a photo, and add an interesting balance between subjects and background. Once you start playing around with this rule, you’ll start to see it more naturally and your photos will begin to improve.

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What is the Rule of Thirds?

This basic composition rule is used by photographers, artists and designers to help create a better composition. The rule basically dictates that photos should be split into 9 equal parts; 2 equally-spaced horizontal lines and 2 equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important features within the frame should intersect with these lines at some point.

Now before we go any further, i’d like to say that the term ‘rule’ in photography is used very loosely and you should never follow a rule if it doesn’t work in your photo. In photography, rules are made to be broken, but it’s always best to know the rule you’re going to break before you break it.

This is what the rule of thirds looks like:

How to Use it

The rule of thirds is a great way to make your average day to day photos look a little bit more interesting. Consider this comparison below. By moving the subject off center it adds depth to the image where there once was none.

Knowing about the rule of thirds will help you see potential photos in different ways. In these photos below, instead of merely taking a symmetrical photo, which would have been easy, but boring, I decided to have the horizon intersect with the top third line in the frame. This change in perspective again adds depth to the photo and grabs your attention with an interesting foreground.

When you’re taking a photo of someone and trying to observe the rule of thirds, I find it’s best to place the subject to the side of the frame so that they’re facing into the photo and not out. There are exceptions where the background might be particularly interesting with a nice hokeh or depth of field, but in general, it’s best to have them looking into the frame. I also tend to line up the eyes with one of the guide lines as it creates a good balance in the photo.

Finally, when you’re framing a photo, look for natural lines in the frame and try to line up with thirds with them. The photo below has the subject looking inwards, creating depth and interest, but it also has vertical lines that line up with one third of the photo. This helps to maintain a good balance in the photo and ensure the the space to the right of the subject is not wasted.