Composition mistakes photographers make (and how to avoid them)

Do your images often look slightly off? We’ll help steer you right by avoiding these ten common composition mistakes and so you can start taking better photographs.

1. Subject too small in the frame
Our brains do a great job of zooming in on a subject and somehow excluding the surroundings, but when you look at an image they become obvious while the subject seems small and inconsequential in the frame. Before you take a shot consider whether it would look better if you took a few steps forward or zoomed in a little with your lens so the subject really fills the frame.

2. Shooting straight-on
Many novices get preoccupied with finding a subject and forget to think about how they’re going to photograph it. If you shoot a subject straight-on you will record its appearance, but you may fail to capture any context or atmosphere.

When you’re shooting a flower in a garden, for example, rather than shooting it straight-on from the edge of the bed, think about shooting it from the side so you have the rest of the flowerbed extending into the distance to give a sense of the huge number of blooms and the depth of colour.

3. Subject in the middle
Although a central subject can sometimes work it’s often better to shoot with it over to one side following the ‘rule of thirds’.  Many cameras are capable of showing a grid in the viewfinder and/or screen that can can help with this rule by splitting the scene into three equally sized columns and three equally sized rows. Your main subject should be positioned where two of the lines cross, with other image elements being located along the grid lines.

4. Nothing in the foreground
Whether you’re shooting a landscape or a still life image it pays to have something in the foreground to give the shot depth, add some scale and help draw the viewer’s eye. As well as being a waste of space, an empty foreground can act as a barrier to the eye that you feel you have to peer over.

Whether its a clump of flowers, a rock or tidemarks in the sand, most landscapes have something that can be used to inject a little interest into the foreground. When you’re constructing a still life scene it’s up to you to put something in the right place.

5. Deciding aspect ratio post capture
This point often goes hand-in-hand with an empty foreground because there’s a tendency to crop to remove the blank space and improve the composition. Post-capture cropping is fine, but you’ll usually find you make better images if you consider the aspect ratio at the shooting stage. Many cameras allow you to set aspect ratio so you can see different cropping in the viewfinder or on the main screen before taking the shot.

found at http://www.digitalcameraworld.com