Art of Composition Part Two
Part of the challenge in writing about the art of composition is simply deciding where to begin. Naturally, this is a big topic. It’s an important topic. Photography is visual art and therefore everything in the photograph is, in some way, connected to this concept. How we use light, where shadows fall, what we choose to include and exclude, how we order the things we are including within the picture space, and where the subject falls in juxtaposition with all of this are just a few examples.
But we do have to begin somewhere.
Before we can talk about all the “stuff” in a photograph, the trees, the rocks, the shadows, the lines, the esoteric concepts of golden ratios, and all of that, maybe the best place to start is a discussion about how we go about including or excluding all that stuff to begin with.
I could say we are going to begin by talking about depth of field, but words are a funny thing. On workshops, when I talk about depth of field, people tend to glaze over. But when reframed as bokeh, as those creamy out of focus backgrounds wildlife photographers love so much, it’s a different story.
Yet, bokeh is not the same as depth of field (DOF), even though bokeh is created by depth of field.
Confused?
Not to worry, this is exactly why I mention it. And this is exactly why I believe depth of field is a natural beginning for us wildlife photographers.
But before we begin, definitions are in order. So let’s get this out of the way right from the beginning: depth of field (DOF) is the zone of what appears to be in acceptable focus within a photograph.
In the simplest of terms possible. . .
The greater the depth of field, the “more that is in focus.”
The shallower the depth of field is, the “less that is in focus.”
The reason I feel this is an important starting point is simply because we cannot always pick and choose exactly what is going to be inside of our composition. This isn’t like painting, where we sit down to a blank canvas and make the decision that a rock will go here, and a “happy little tree” will go over there. Nature, more often than not, is chaos. The various things that surround our subjects is a swirling vortex of entropy. And as wildlife photographers, as artists, it is our job to create order out of this chaos.
If you don’t know the word “entropy,” it’s a scientific term relating to the measurable degree of randomness and, well, chaos.
It’s for this reason that depth of field becomes important. No amount of understanding things like the elements of design is going to help unless we understand how to try and control that which is uncontrollable.
When we think of depth of field, the most important thing to understand is that it’s completely dependent upon distance.
If you are reading this, you most likely understand that a lens with a maximum aperture of f/2.8 can produce a shallower depth of field than a lens that is f/5.6. But what you might not know is that an f/5.6 lens can produce the same look and feel and creamy bokeh of f/2.8, if you want it to.
How? Why?
It’s all about distance.
Here are the basics: The farther away the background is from the subject, the softer it will be. However, equally as important to the distance of the background, and often even more important in my opinion, is HOW CLOSE YOU ARE TO YOUR SUBJECT.
The closer to a subject you are, the shallower the depth of field will be at a given aperture.
If I use a 400mm f/2.8 lens and focus on an oystercatcher sitting 15 feet away, for instance, the depth of field will be 0.07 feet. This is 0.84 inches. So, literally less than one inch. This means that only an area a little less than an inch in size will appear to be acceptably in focus in the photograph. This is very narrow – although depending upon your perspective, perfectly acceptable.
But let’s jump considerably further. Let’s say we are focusing on a subject that is 100 yards/meters away. Let’s say it’s an elk at the edge of the forest. Reading the distance here in this article, it may seem like this is ridiculously far. However, this is something I see on a regular basis by many photographers — especially those wielding high-resolution sensors who like to “crop in” on their subjects.
At 100 yards/meters with a 400mm lens at f/2.8, we are looking at a depth of field of 30 feet!
This means that anything falling within a 30-foot bubble around our subject will appear just as in focus as the subject itself. That means trees, branches, sticks, rocks, grass, other animals, EVERYTHING within this bubble is in focus.
And this is at f/2.8.
If we were to use f/6.3, like many popular zoom lenses today, our depth of field would be nearly 70 feet.
I don’t know about you, but 70 feet is a very big area for me to have everything in focus. This means that I will have to be hypersensitive of every single thing in the composition at all times to make that work.
This is why distance is everything. Distance from the lens to the subject and distance from the subject to the background.
More often than not, with wildlife photography especially, we want our subjects to pop out from the rest of the composition. This is why we tend to obsess over depth of field and bokeh. It allows us to bring the subject to the immediate attention of the viewer instead of being lost to the entropy of the environment. Given the extraordinarily short attention spans of most people in industrialized nations nowadays, we typically have only a fraction of a second to capture someone’s attention when they look at a photograph.
Technically speaking, most people living in the United States today have an attention span of roughly eight seconds. Ironically, this is shorter than a goldfish’s, which is nine seconds. However, as a photographer in today’s world, it’s much worse than this.
Whether you are an amateur photographer doing all of this for the love of the craft or a professional trying to sell your photographs, you must convey enough information for someone to understand what is happening in your photographs within only a fraction of a second.
Consider how someone looks at photos on Facebook. Viewing all those photos on a mobile device as most do, people see only a small version of the photos as they whiz by at a seemingly blinding speed. And then occasionally, some bit of information their brains processed within a nanosecond stops them in their tracks and they invest their eight seconds of attention on that photograph.
The same goes for selling photographs to magazines. There was a time when great photographs of wildlife were rare commodities. Today, however, thanks to the democratization of photography due to the advent of digital technology, editors are completely overwhelmed with extraordinary photographs. Whether an editor is culling through potential photos for an article they have sitting in a folder, or, worse yet, they are scrolling through images on a stock photography website, oftentimes they are trying to choose just 10 or 15 images out of many thousands. And so they often employ the exact same technique as a Facebook user scrolling through their newsfeed.
So, how is all that relevant to you?
If you are unable to make your subject stand out from its environment so that it’s INSTANTLY recognizable without the viewer ever having to think about what they are seeing, then you will always fail to grab people’s attention long enough for them to even look at your work.
This is why we working photographers obsess over bokeh, depth of field, and “fast lenses.” And this is part of the reason that we are willing to take huge financial sacrifices to have lenses like a 400mm f/2.8 or a 600mm f/4. Despite the extraordinary weight and crazy price tags, these lenses give us the ability to make our subjects “pop” in situations that are simply not possible with more affordable pieces of glass like a 200-600, 200-500, or 150-600mm lens.
But as I mentioned above, this doesn’t mean that you cannot make your subject pop out with these other lenses. It doesn’t mean you can’t create a similar look and feel and bokeh-licious background as an f/2.8 lens. It just means that you will have to be a bit more precise with how you photograph the subject. And one of the best ways of looking at all of this is from the perspective of “distance.”
As an example, let’s take a look at these oystercatcher photos (genus Haematopus). Both of these are flight shots. Neither photograph is exceptional in any way. They are both run-of-the-mill stock photos from my library. Cliché. Trite. They will never end up on the wall in someone’s home. But they do sell as stock photos, and they serve well to illustrate what I am trying to convey here.
Looking at the two images, can you tell which one was created using an f/2.8 and which one using f/8?
The photograph of the oystercatcher preparing to land on the oyster bar was created using f/2.8 while the fly by was created using f/8.
When it comes to the background, the one photographed at f/8 is so much better. It’s all creamy bokeh — even though we all know that f/2.8 is going to produce the shallower depth of field. But the reason the f/8 photograph has a softer and more out of focus background than the f/2.8 photograph is because of distance. Not only was the background further away from the bird, but I was also closer to the bird as well. The f/2.8 photograph, on the other hand, has a background that is considerably closer than the other one. And, because of my distance to the bird, I had to crop the photograph in Lightroom.
When we add these two things together, my distance from the bird and the bird’s distance from the background, despite being created at f/2.8, the landing photograph contains significantly more detail in the environment around the bird.
Distance.
Even if you use an f/5.6 or f/6.3 lens, you can still achieve the creamy bokeh that most of us are searching for – as the two images of the oystercatchers shows. But because of the increased depth of field with these smaller apertures, understanding exactly how DOF works, how it relates to your lens, and how to approach your subject with DOF in mind, becomes an absolutely crucial skill set to be successful.
To be continued..