COMPOSITION
PICK YOUR TARGET. Make sure you know what the star attraction in your frame should be. Is it that kudu bull with the three-turn horns, or the pretender with two turns next to it? Ensure that your composition points all eyes straight to the main subject. ( Yes, the three-turn bull!)
ISOLATE A DETAIL. A herd of elephants will always make for a good photo, but how do you make your photo better than everyone else’s on the same game-drive vehicle?
You find a detail that tells a story, like Annemarie did in her elephant portrait above. See how the legs of the big elephants create a “frame” around the small one, and how the delicate touch of the mother’s trunk creates an intimate scene? By cropping out the bodies of the big elephants,
Annemarie made the most of this moment.
Her composition is tight, with nothing going to waste.
HORIZONTAL OR VERTICAL? Decide whether your scene is suited better to a portrait-shaped frame (holding the camera in a vertical position) or a landscape orientation (holding it horizontally). Often, the subject will point you in the right direction. Standing in front of a church with a tall spire, looking up, a portrait-shaped photo is best – if you want to fit in the whole spire. On the other hand, standing broadside to a bus usually demands landscape orientation.
Good photographers will always shoot a scene both ways, just in case you need a variety of options later.
THE RULE OF THIRDS. Just like “Sailing” by Rod Stewart, this compositional guideline is a Golden Oldie that still has some legs. Divide your frame in three, from side to side and top to bottom.
Where the imaginary lines cross – those are your sweet spots. Place your main subject (a sailboat?) at one of the intersections and your composition will be strong. (Many cameras have an option of displaying the rule of thirds grid in the eyepiece or on the screen.)
SYMMETRY. Okay, take everything I said above with a pinch of salt. Of course, in photography, rules are there to be broken. Some scenes call for a central composition, where the main subject is in the middle and the two halves of the frame are balanced.
RIAAN WOLHUTER
Nikon D7200 • Nikon 200 – 500 mm lens
RIAAN WRITES: We were having lunch at Olifants rest camp in the Kruger Park when this herd of elephants appeared on the opposite riverbank. I suspected that they would cross the river at a shallower section downstream. The view from the restaurant was obscured, so I abandoned my toasted sandwich and ran to get this photo.
The Kruger is always full of surprises. Patience and effort will get you results.
TOAST SAYS: Compare Riaan’s pic with Annemarie’s on the opposite page. Riaan’s photo is all about the elephants as a group, where Annemarie’s is about an individual within such a herd. By deciding to frame wider and including more animals, Riaan has given us some cues as to how he wants us to “read” his photo.
We now see the elephants as clever herd animals, sticking together as they intrepidly cross a river. We see the landscape around them, which brings an appreciation of their constant battle to find food.
The composition is classic: The animals move through the frame in a diagonal line and anchor the corners. No space in the frame is wasted – it’s filled with elephants and water. Rocks and plants provide some colour and texture to further draw the eye.
It also helps if you know the area (Riaan knew where the river was shallow) and how animals behave (Riaan knew they’d seek out the shallower water). This helps you predict what will happen and you can get into the right position before the action takes place.
A good photographer has a strong imagination and can visualise how a picture might look before that picture is taken. You need to be able to predict the future.
Maybe we should ask Riaan for some Lotto numbers?
FRANCOIS VAN JAARSVELD
Nikon D600 • Nikon 18 – 36 mm lens • IG: @francois.vanjaarsveld.12
FRANCOIS WRITES: I’m an amateur landscape photographer from Heidelberg in Gauteng, and I often take groups up the Amphitheatre in the Drakensberg. This photo shows the Eastern Buttress and Devil’s Tooth and was taken from the top of Tugela Falls. We slept on the mountain to be in place for the golden hour at sunrise.
My camera is always mounted on a tripod for stability. I specialise in sunrise and sunset photos and I edit the photos to compensate for the difference in exposure between the light and dark areas. I also adjust contrast and colour saturation, and I crop my photos to improve composition.
I used an aperture of f6.3 in aperture priority mode. I took three photos with bracketed exposures and blended them later.
TOAST SAYS: Francois’s photo has artistic flair. The composition is spot on, with every blade of grass, cloud and crag in the right place. It’s not just casually composed – thought has gone into everything.
A wildlife photographer will be concerned about the position of an animal in the frame – or its eyes, if it’s a close-up portrait – but there might be no animal or human in a landscape photo. The photographer must focus on other things, like the brightest part of the scene (the glow of the sun in the top right of Francois’s photo) or where an eye-catching detail of the landscape stands proud (maybe the silhouette of a tree, or a pleasing rock stack).
Francois also took note of the natural lines formed by the mountains, and how they lead your eye through the scene. Take a look at the beautiful layer of mist. That’s important for the composition, providing a pleasing texture to the middle part of the frame, gradually leading your eye further in.
He hasn’t ignored the rule of thirds either – that bright bit of sun is a third from the top of the frame, and a third from the right-hand side. Some purists believe blending photos is cheating, but you could achieve the same effect in a darkroom back in the days of film photography – if you knew what you were doing. The process is a little easier now. You need software like Photoshop, and there are lots of videos on YouTube to talk you through the process. (Search for “How to cleanly blend 3 exposures in Photoshop”, for example.)
Make sure you get the basics right, as Francois did. Use a tripod to ensure that the composition of each shot is exactly the same – otherwise your photos won’t “fit” on top of each other. “Bracketing your exposure” means taking three different exposures: Use a “normal” exposure for the first photo, underexpose the second, and overexpose the third. Expose according to the brightest part of the photo (usually the sky), the darkest part (in Francois’s photo, the shaded side of the cliffs), and somewhere in between. Then, if you blend your photos successfully, you’ll have a picture that is perfectly exposed all over.
That being said, Francois’s photo is about more than technique. It shows that hard work (climbing a mountain, getting up early) pays off.