The Wide-Angle Lens Technique Many Have Forgotten

In this video I'm going to teach you a very old compositional technique that creates instant impact in your images, especially when you're using a wide angle lens like a 16-35 and it's not the rule of thirds or emphasizing something in the foreground. Sometimes when we're trying to compose our images, especially when there's a lot of space around our subjects, the rule of thirds can let us down. Whilst it's a fantastic guide for composition, having a subject on one side and then having loads of dead space on the other doesn't necessarily always work out that well. It can make it feel as if we're just including stuff for the sake of it. We can be left with an unbalanced composition. Likewise, when we're trying to emphasize our foreground in our composition, which is an excellent tool to use for composition, but it can diminish the subject itself. The foreground can become so dominant that the subject itself, which is why we took the picture in the first place, can just be lost and we don't end up with the impact that we initially wanted. So what is this high impact compositional technique that people just don't seem to be using that much anymore? Well, it was used in the creation of Adam by Michelangelo. It was also used in American Gothic by Grant Wood. It was used in The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci and it was used in Gold With A Pearl Earring by Vermeer. And the technique is the I'm going to teach you a couple of steps to do this in a way that's really repeatable, high impact and helps you build the composition so it looks balanced and it works. You've probably heard of the expression, build a frame. Well, if any compositional technique takes use of that expression, it is the centralized composition. Centralized compositions allow the subject to be really large and dominant within the picture if you want them to be. But I'm going to give you my first tip on centralized compositions now and how to do them for photography, because obviously paintings are one thing, but photography is something else. Imagine making a print of your work. I know it's rare that anyone prints anything nowadays, but just try to use your imagination. Imagine what a printed photograph looks like. What you need to do is think about how someone might put a matte border around that picture. What we're going to do in order to compose our centralized compositions is we're going to put the subject within the space that would be left in the middle by having a matte border. So we're going to fill that central portion. Then the outside area of the image, we're going to let that be the surrounding landscape. We're going to divide the picture up into two relevant sections. The central part itself, which can be as small or large as you want it to be. It depends on what's in front of you and the outside border is going to be all of the supporting information. That is the less important, the less dominant stuff. This can just be sky and landscape. It doesn't have to be anything particularly important. It can even be plain background. Look at the girl with the pearl earring. There's a lot of space around her. There's a lot of dead space, but it's all the way around. And because she's in the middle, it doesn't make us feel like the dead space is wasted. So we have two parts of the picture. We have the subject in the middle, and then we have the supporting information around the outside. How do we go about doing this in the real world when we've got our camera? What can we do? That's a really simple method. Well, I'm going to give it to you now. This works especially well with a wide angle zoom lens, but you can do this on any lens really, if you want to. It's just a compositional technique. So this will work for mid-range and telephoto lenses as well. So what we'll do is we'll fill the frame as much as we can with our subject. It has to be well composed, but we're going to absolutely fill it. So it feels balanced, but it's a tight composition. Then we're going to zoom out and we're going to allow our border to naturally fill the rest of the frame. And as we zoom out, we're looking for the point at which it feels right and it feels natural. We may have to move the camera slightly and reframe as we're doing this, but we should zoom out to the point at which we feel there is balance. Zooming out will allow all of the surrounding information that's there naturally in the landscape or the city or wherever you're taking a photograph, or even a portrait. It will allow it to fill that space, but we get to decide where that border is. That border section that I was telling you about before, we get to decide where that starts and stops, but we're intentionally doing this. This is the real difference. We're not just sticking something in the middle and pressing the button. We're in our minds focusing on the central composition and then the wider framing border around that central composition that gives the picture life. It makes it feel like it's meant to be like that. The difference this will make in your work can be tremendous because there are downsides to centralized compositions, but there are some real upsides as well. The main big upside to the centralized composition is that it has instant impact. The eye doesn't have to start somewhere and roam in and find and then rest somewhere. It's just, bang, there it is. People get grabbed by this and it makes them stop, but in order to do that, you have to have a strong subject. It can be really difficult to do this with something that's a weak central subject. Now, let me be clear as well. This is not to replace the other compositional techniques that you can use. I'm just trying to bring your attention back to this really old compositional technique because when people are teaching rule of thirds, this is the thing that they tell you to stop doing. I don't know why they tell people to stop doing this, when they should still be doing this when it's the relevant thing to do. The kinds of subjects that work really well with central compositions are people, buildings, and any really dominant large landscape features. An exercise that you can do to help you get better at this is to go out into your local town, city, village, whatever it is, wherever you live. Even if you don't shoot that genre of photography, it doesn't matter. This is about training your eye and practice this in your local area. Even if you're a portrait photographer, you should use other genres of photography to help you get better and see you can absolutely frame a building up and learn composition from that and improve your portrait work or any other genre of photography that you do. So I'm just going to expand on this tip for you. One of the best things I ever did was a really long architectural project that I just did for the hell of it in order to improve my composition. I ended up becoming architectural photographer of the year in 2013 for one of my pictures of the Lloyds building. And the lessons that I learned through studying architecture and learning these compositional techniques transformed my composition just completely because photography is photography and composition is composition. It all translates and crosses over. So you don't have to have people there all the time or another subject or a bird or whatever it is that you photograph. You can practice this on anything. So I suggest you get out with your camera and start practicing and use all of these compositional tools, but maybe spend some time focusing just on this centralized technique so you can get better at it. And if you find these kind of tips useful, check out my Patreon page in the link down below. But I'd really like to hear some comments from you guys. Did you find this useful? Is it something that you knew, but you'd forgotten about it? Or maybe it was one of those things where it's like, I know that, but why aren't I just using it? If you have a favorite compositional technique that you like to use, leave it in the comments for other people to read, and then they can perhaps make use of that as well. We're all sharing and we're all learning all the time. Remember to subscribe if you're new here. If you like this kind of content, give me a thumbs up if that was good, and I'll see you guys again in the next video. Take care. Bye-bye.