Keep verticals vertical and horizon-tals horizontal. Buildings that appearto lean or horizon lines that tilt arelikely to make your viewers nervousor queasy. Avoid them by holdingyour camera level, or correct the printby cropping. Receding lines in thebackground are rarely a problem, butbe sure the central image lookssteady, unless you have a good reasonto do otherwise.

Place your subject in its environ-ment. As another general rule, it ishelpful to give the viewer some senseof the subject's surroundings. Thisdoes not mean, for example, that youneed to pull away to show the entireneighborhood where a person is stan-ding. A little bit of background detailmay be all that's needed to providea suitable context. Even clothing canprovide an environment for a per-son's face.

Here's an excellent example of a highly structured photograph. Notice howthe lower hand forms a downward triangle with the two girls' heads. Thehands of the girl on the right form a second triangle (pointing up). Whatlines emphasize the triangles? How does the sweater of the girl on the leftrelate to the background pattern of the jungle-gym bars? How does theposition of the girls relate to the vertical lines of the 9-zone grid? How dothe bars relate to the horizontal lines? (Student photograph by Jun Hwang.)

Line can also contribute to thestructure of a photograph without be-ing directly involved in the positionof its subject. The most common wayit does this is by literally dividing theframe up in some kind of grid pat-tern. The grid produced by lines in aphoto may or may not be the sameas the compositional grid we havejust been looking at. The lines maymake a different grid of their own.In this case, the grid produced by thelines is added to the basic composi-tional grid. The rules concerning thecompositional grid, however, remainthe same.

In fact, as you experiment withline, you will probably discover thatthe compositional grid corresponds

quite accurately to the best placementof the most important lines in theframe. For example, horizon lines aregenerally most pleasing, and seemmost natural, when they are placedvery near one of the two horizontallines in the compositional grid.Similarly, a key vertical line, such asthe edge of a wall, will generally workbest when it is placed near either ofthe two vertical lines of the grid. Thisobservation leads to another: in mostphotographs that employ lines, thelines have merely weighted the pho-tograph in one or another direction,depending on how they have beenplaced within the compositional grid.In other words, lines work within thegrid just as any other objects do.

What is Composition? 59What is Composition? 59

An unusual kind of balance is produced by composing a photograph sothat it "pulls" in opposite directions. This photograph is weighted towardboth the upper-right-hand and lower-left-hand corners. What effect doesthat have on its impact and mood? (Student photograph by BrianMacMillan.)

ShapeShape affecls structure in two ways:by where it is . . . and by where itisn't. Though the idea may be hardto grasp until we explore it further (inthe chapter on Shape), every objectin a photograph actually has twoshapes. The first shape is the obviousone: the space an object takes upwithin the frame, known as positivespace. The second is less obvious: thespace that surrounds an object. Thissecond shape is called negative space.Because careful composition is re-quired to make negative space in-teresting, it is one of the main dif-ferences between photographs andsnapshots.

Negative space is defined byborders the borders of an objectand the borders of the photograph'sframe. The closer those borders areto each other, the more effective thenegative space will be. If the subject

of a photograph is surrounded by toomuch negative space, the overall ef-fect may be weakened. In this case,the borders of the frame may be toofar away from the object to interactwith it in an interesting way.

So, when you position a shapewithin the frame of a photograph,you need to pay attention to twothings:

First, is the shape itself interesting?If not, you can usually improve uponit by either altering the shape (askinga model to change position, for ex-ample) or by changing the angle fromwhich you are photographing i t . It isnot enough simply to find an in-teresting subject; anyone who takesa snapshot does that. The photog-rapher's job is to make an interestingphotograph of an interesting subject,which is quite a different thing.

The second point you need to thinkabout when you position a shape is

how it fits within the frame. Does itdo something interesting in relationto the other objects and the frame?If not, you probably need to movethe object or move your camera.

BalanceBalance is an equal relationship be-tween two or more things. If youplace two objects on a balancingscale, they are balanced when bothsides of the scale are of the sameweight. It's no different in photog-raphy. A photograph is balancedwhen the various elements "weigh"the same. This does not mean thatthey must take up the same amountof room. What it does mean is a gooddeal more complex.

Let's say you are taking aphotograph of a tree. You canbalance the photograph in severalways, depending on the tree's sur-roundings and on the effect youwant. If the tree stands alone againsta blank sky, you'll probably want itto nearly fill the frame-in whichcase the negative space will interactwell with the frame. In this case, thephotograph has a single subject: the

60 The Photographic Eye