If you were to ask me what the most common composition errors I see in workshop participants images, I would say these are the main points that spring to mind:
The sky takes up too much area of the picture, for no good reason, except that it’s the sky.
The majority of the subjects that make up the composition live in the bottom half of the picture. So the viewer spends most of the time in the bottom region of the image. And as a result, the composition feels as though it is sinking through the bottom of the frame.
Some of the main subjects of the composition are bunched up too tightly towards the bottom edge of the frame, and in some cases are also falling through the bottom of the frame.
There is too much sky for no good reason. Except that it’s the sky.
Did I repeat point 1 as point 4?
Let me digress for a little bit.
Each time I have come round to publishing a new photographic book, it’s a long drawn out process of piecing it together. The text is usually what slows the publication date down a lot because it has to get checked. I now use a professional editor to verify the text because I have noticed a few things that repeatedly happen when I ask people to proof read the text:
The titles are never checked.
The words ‘of’ and ‘the’ are not checked. It seems that the eye scans the text rather than reads it and we tend to insert missing words into the text when we don’t find them. There is a little experiment you may have seen where someone asks you to count the number of ‘f’s and ‘t’s in a sentence and you get it wrong. Because we don’t parse the words ‘the’ and ‘of’.
Two subjects, not one. The tree is not the only subject. The sun is just as important as the tree is, and they balance diagonally opposite each other. Yet I believe that most viewers consider the tree the subject of the photo. The sun is just the sun. That’s not true - the sun is just as important a subject as the tree is.
But mainly, no matter whom I’ve asked to help proof read the text, seldom checks the titles. I almost went to press after 10 individual proof readings with a title that said ‘Bolovino’ rather than ‘Bolivian’ in the title of the text.
My reasons for mentioning this is that vision is a funny old thing. There is a lot of psychology to it that most of us lay people do not understand but scientists have begun to realise.
Perhaps some day I will write a book about the most common errors that I see in composition, as I feel there is some relationship of these errors to how the brain interprets. We look, but we do not see.
My point is, that the sky is just as important as the ground is where composition is concerned. But for some reason it is treated as something that just seems to fill up around half of the area of the rectangle for no other reason than ‘it’s the sky, and I just fill up half of the frame with it’.
When I am working with skies, they can often break of make a composition. I have found that they can contain motifs or repeating shapes that mirror shapes in the landscape and when that happens, they become a core component to the composition. Other times the sky may break the composition. Here are some examples:
There is cloud cover over one half of the region of the frame, while the other side is blank. This causes light reduction on one half of the frame while the other half of the frame is around 2 stops lighter. When this happens, the picture looks as though the grad was left on sideways.
Uneven skies can cause distractions - particularly if they are brighter towards the very edge of the frame.
Sometimes sky is just a space for objects to float in. Rather than thinking of an image as having ‘sky’ and ‘ground’, think of it as ‘canvas’.
In my own style of photography, I often avoid complex skies. I’m talking about skies with lots of clouds and tones in them, because they can be overly distracting to the main compositional features I’ve found in the ground. This is one of the reasons why I work in overcast light (apart from the light being very soft - a huge advantage), overcast skies tend to have little in the way of distractions to cause tonal inconsistencies or ‘bald’ regions of the sky later on.
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Indeed, I hear photographers tell me that Namibia is best around April because there are lots of clouds in the sky. If I were going to Namibia, I would be going when the skies are completely empty of clouds, because it enables simpler compositions.
Skies are important integral parts of the composition. They need just as much thought and consideration as the main subjects of the composition, and in some cases, can break the composition if there are overly demanding tones or shapes in there. Skies are also extremely difficult to work with because we have zero control over what they do. Whereas we do at least have some control over the main subjects by moving forward, moving backwards, or removing them from the compositions, but for me, skies are often problematic when they have a lot going on.
Give your skies a lot more thought if you can. Consider if they are brighter at one side of the photo, and whether they have some of the ore dominant brighter elements of your composition (sometimes white clouds may end up being the most dominant feature of your composition). So try to think of your skies as just the same as your ground elements: they also contain tones and shapes and they are just as important as the rest of the scene.