When I work on a composition of a subject, I tend to make around 3 major images of the same subject. In other words, I like to work the scene and for one subject I will maybe come away with three images that are hopefully quite different.
My view is that: there is no one single composition to be found. There are often many.
The image above is more graphic, more abstract than the scene below, which I consider to be more ‘classical’ in composition. By ‘classical’ I mean ‘expected’, ‘traditional’ or perhaps just a bit more conventional.
I would like to explain that when I made these two photographs, they were maybe a few minutes apart. On one of them I chose to include the sun in the clouds whereas the top image I chose to leave it out. I think that it takes courage as a photographer to remove a vital component of a scene in order to maybe focus or strengthen what you are doing. My own personal view is that the image above is stronger than the image below. It is more ‘quantised’, or ‘reduced’. I’ve reduced it down to a few black lines. The bottom image although containing those black lines isn’t as powerful because our attention is taken elsewhere (the sun). But more over, the bottom scene is clearly a photograph of a volcano in a landscape. It has a great deal of content. Whereas the image above does not have the same clues to give us context. It is less a photo and more like a calligraphic drawing with two black ink strokes.
Often when we talk about composition, it’s about the placement of objects in the scene, whereas i tend to think that tone and colour are just as important as the subjects. But I think to create more surprising work, we need to step away from classical thoughts. Again, to explain what I mean by ‘classical’, I mean ‘conventional’. And I don’t mean it in a positive way. For a while now I’ve had a real problem with conventions such as ‘rule of thirds’, etc. These are just conventions to get us going, but they are also a trap in taking us into a cul-de-sac of the mediocrity. Making compositions that people expect is just going to make your work predictable and boring. But you do have to start there - learn the basics, so you can ‘unlearn them’ later.
It’s simply not enough now to create a ‘nice composition’. I think my first image has the edge on the second because it’s slightly less conventional, perhaps a little more graphical. More abstract. It requires a bit more time to work out than the bottom image.
When you are composing, try to work the scene. Don’t just assume you’ve found your composition. Yes, it’s a nice composition but there are many more. Try to work the scene by moving around, and by removing some of the elements of the scene that you initially thought were vital. I think it takes a sense of conviction to remove that sun from the 2nd image and focus on the volcano. But I have often said that composition is more about what you leave out, than what you leave in.