Basic Composition Tips; Simplifying

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I’m writing about composition quite a lot, but not in detail so i decided to write about these subject i already wrote about in detail as in my last post “getting close and filling the frame“. Today’s subject is simplicity.

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Simplicity is really important in photography. It can be described as avoiding any unnecessary objects from the frame. Especially messy backgrounds, and unnecessary objects on the foreground make confusing images. Your pictures should reveal a single subject or idea and you should be able to define your picture with a sentence. If people ask you “where this picture is taken?” it is ok but if they ask you “what is it about?” and “what is the subject?” than it means you’re not doing well enough.

Ask yourself “what is your subject” before taking the picture. Than think about if the objects in the foreground or background are really necessary for the picture that you want to take. If they are not, avoid them by changing position or angle or both. Simplifying or isolating your subject in other words, will improve the quality of your pictures you’ll see it after a couple of tries. You may often have to change your position and angle to do that. Taking picture from a higher ground can help you avoid unnecessary and confusing backgrounds. Also getting on your knees or lying to the ground helps you get rid of unwanted objects and let you use only sky as a background. Also you can use depth of field as a tool for getting rid of busy backgrounds. ( To learn more about Depth of Field read my related article.) Lower f values like f/3.5 etc. that make the aperture of the camera wider, decrease the range of depth of field and making everywhere flu or blur except the point or subject that focused on. So you can use depth of field to avoid busy backgrounds too. One last tip about simplifying, is taking silhouette pictures of your subject. (To learn more about silhouettes, read my related article.)

The picture below is an example for simplifying your pictures and isolating the subject from any unnecessary objects in the scene. The picture is taken by my dear friend Emrah Fahri Gursoy;