PERFECT YOUR COMPOSITION
Learn to capture the cleanest, most dramatic perspectives in the busy city environment
By their very nature cities are hard things to photograph. The majority of scenes are built up along a vertical axis, since buildings are often taller than they are wide. Where they are short but wide you then have lots of negative space between them, which can leave photographic compositions feeling unbalanced. If you attempt to pitch the camera up or down you risk introducing converging verticals, while adjusting the yaw of the lens position will enhance lateral perspective. This creates strong leading lines which, without care, can drag the viewer’s eye out of the shot prematurely.
Meanwhile, simply rotating the orientation of the camera into portrait format, for tall subjects, can remove any sense of height or direction, producing a flat shot with no identifiable starting or ending point.
It’s apparent that, with cityscapes and city life studies, it’s important to adjust the composition on a scene-by-scene basis. No two urban environments are the same, even though the architecture may appear similar. The layout of the street impacts how many obstructions there are between the camera and the subject, so this must be assessed before shooting begins. Then it is a matter of exploring the scene fully, to examine how all of the components work together.
This may sound like a simple process, but it is more than a case of shooting many images from different angles. As the photographer you have to understand what you are looking for, being able to identify when a composition is working well and when the frame is too busy, or has a detail imbalance. If you are being experimental with exposure, creating silhouettes for example, you have to be aware of overlaps between building structures, which will distort the outline. In such cases a change in focal length would be required to create separation.
The technical considerations can be intimidating, even for experienced photographers, but sometimes cityscape composition can benefit from simpler adjustment. The key to the perfect frame might be a slightly wider focal length, to incorporate some foreground vegetation, or to use another building as a natural frame. Just remember that ‘different’ will always hold the viewer’s gaze for longer.