Clean composition
Try using different elements to frame your photographs
The image on the previous pages probably seems natural; maybe even too easy an example of being clean, so here I’d like to show how it can work with a busier, less controllable scene. This situation was special. I was on a three-month assignment photographing an ethnic minority in northern Thailand that was, at the time, not very well known.
As part of this assignment, the anthropologist and I trekked for a few days to the border with Myanmar, and stayed in an Akha village that had only recently moved here to escape fighting and problems in Shan State. We were the first Westerners the community had seen, so despite appearances here, I was the exotic one. A several-hundred-metre aqueduct had been built from a spring higher up the mountain to supply water, and I came across these two young girls filling gourds.
This was their everyday dress, and the scene was just so natural and far removed from modern life that purely as a record it was valuable – as indeed were so many other scenes in the village.
What could be simpler and more straightforward than two children drawing water? In fact, it was not that simple, because there were competing elements of interest…
On the principle of clean shooting,
I had to eliminate distractions, hence the immediate decision to shoot with a 180mm telephoto tightly framed from quite close to kill the larger village setting. That left the girls in their unique dress, the gourd, and the aqueduct; I needed to orchestrate all three in the time it took to fill the gourd and without interfering.
A situation like this offers the temptation for photographers to go into ‘please do it again’ mode. Anthropology is involved here, and even the slightest staging would make it all invalid. The focal point of the scene was the water, and in particular the way that the girl had placed a fallen leaf in the bamboo conduit to divert the stream. This wasn’t improvisation; it was normal usage, natural and intelligent design. I first honed right in on this in close-up, then stepped back for a vertical shot of the girl, but then realized that if I made a clean composition, I could get more into the frame without losing the focal point of the leaf and the stream of water into the gourd.
Aperture also played a part, because while the leaf, stream of water, gourd and girl’s head ought all to be sharp, the background should be soft. That meant this exact camera position, with the out-offocus foreground of the second girl and bamboo aqueduct on the left side neatly framing the leaf and water. Everything is
separated, yet the frame is full, and all that remains is a precise moment, which came when the girl turned her head. The small glittering spray of water striking the mouth of the gourd was an unexpected bonus.
Composition, together with framing, is often where most photographers put effort into making an image as clean as possible. However, other image qualities can come into play, and we’ve seen some of them at work both in the Dedham Vale picture on the previous pages, and here. One approach is to consider all the visual tools at your disposal to see how they might work. Interestingly, in Chinese traditional brush painting the concept of clean, xie lian, translates more or less as ‘cleaning from all directions’, meaning working clean in all possible ways.
All do a job, and all are linked, even though it’s the composition that leads the way. The part played by lighting is relatively small, and to do with the flow of water sparkling and standing out. However in other situations lighting can be major, as I’ll show you next…