In this, the third bite of our feast of art knowledge, I will talk about an elusive concept called positive and negative space. Traditionally, negative space is defined as the “empty” areas within an image. As you will soon see, even that which is empty can be very tangible.

Let’s start with the most classic demonstration of positive and negative space at work:

Immediately upon viewing this example, you come to realize that your mind has the capacity to create compositional elements from completely empty space. As an artist, you must understand this capability so that you can use it to your advantage. Now let’s try something a little bit different.

We generally see black as a “foreground” color and white as a “background” color, so your first impression of this picture might be that it’s a black jagged thing on a white background. Now take another look, but this time try to see it as a white jagged thing on a black background. With some concentration, you should be able to swap the fields back and forth as you look at it.

Just because a certain space within a composition is “the background” doesn’t mean it is devoid of form.

Now take a look at this funny looking person:

The figure on the left and the black field on the right are our positive space. The white area that surrounds the figure is the negative space, the “void” in the image. In a photograph, negative space is what you might casually perceive as the “juicy filling;” it surrounds your subject(s), it provides them with a place to be, but it is not itself a subject.

The moral here is simply this: do not neglect negative space because it isn’t the subject or focal point of your image. We can easily manipulate the viewpoint to make the negative space play a more dynamic role.

Here I have moved in closer so that the figure’s head touches the top of the frame, splitting the one large area of negative space into two smaller ones. This configuration gives the eye a lot more to play with. I don’t mean to say that this version is universally better than the first one, but it should demonstrate the power that negative space can wield over even a very simple composition.

Always keep negative space in mind when composing your frame; its shape is equally as important as that of your subject and your awareness of it will be immediately visible in your work.

I come from more of a fine art background; my parents both work in the arts and photography for me is an extension of my involvement in art as a whole. By talking about the fundamental concepts of art as they apply to photography I hope to help you improve your work and also understand the works of others.

Because this is only the second part in my Art Concepts series, I want to study the more general and fundamental stuff first. In the last episode, we looked at texture. Texture is a fairly specific element, so today I thought I would take a big step back and talk about composition.

When we say “composition,” we refer not only to the relative locations of the points of interest in a piece (which is the most discussed aspect), but also to their sizes, shapes, colors, and other variables that contribute to the balance (or imbalance) of the work. That’s what we’re going to look at today.

The Rule of Thirds

Photographers who are starting out and who begin exploring the generally available advice for creating interesting images will swiftly come across the rule of thirds. Most everyone who has spent any amount of time reading about photography, or art in general, is sure to have heard about the rule of thirds.

The rule of thirds says that the points of interest in a composition are most effectively placed at the intersections of a grid made up of two horizontal and two vertical lines, each equidistant from one another and from the edges of the piece.

More simply stated, the points of interest in the image ought to be roughly one third the total height or width of the image from any of its edges. This rule was created to help beginners shake the desire to place their subject smack in the center of the frame, which, generally speaking, is a boring thing to do.

As with all things in art, this rule can be broken. With experience, an artist will find situations where a centered subject is very pleasing to the eye, but not until he or she is aware of this rule can it be thoughtfully applied or violated.

Coincidentally, this was also mentioned recently on the Digital Photography School blog in a post entitled Break the Rule of Thirds. You may want to go read that to get an idea of why the rule of thirds can and should be broken on occasion.

More Advanced Principles

The rule of thirds is a simplistic rule, and a useful one for teaching composition fundamentals, but what I want to talk about are lesser-known principles of design that will help you bring even greater control and understanding to your compositions. These principles are:

1. Balance (or weight)
2. Scale
3. Isolation
4. Convergence

These principles are independent, though also related. You can think of them as a visual design toolbox with each tool having a specific use but each specific use being a necessary contributor to the final project. In this case, scale, isolation, and convergence are helpful in managing the emphasis in a piece, which is another principle of design. Of course, your goal as an artist is to communicate an idea or transmit an emotional response of some kind to your audience. Art that fails to do this is of limited value; even stock and documentary photography make use of these design concepts to communicate their messages effectively.

Balance

Compositional balance means maintaining a consistent “visual gravity” across the expanse of a piece so that the eye is not drawn to one side more than the other (for example). More often than not, exciting compositions are intentionally imbalanced, and you may already be creating compositions like that without knowing what fundamental principles you’re invoking.

By means of demonstration, I will use some simple graphics to illustrate the concept of balance. The reason I’m not using photographs to illustrate these design concepts is because I want to be sure your understanding of them is as “pure” as possible, and simple graphics allow me to single out these concepts. In this first example, the image is very clearly imbalanced.

Because the large, black dot is the only thing in the image, you are forced to look at it. Your eye does not want to hang around in that empty white space because it just isn’t interested in it. The feeling of having your eye drawn more toward one thing than another is what we mean by weight. Balance is achieved by placing elements of the same weight in roughly symmetrical areas of the composition. Let’s balance this composition out in the simplest way:

By placing an identical dot on the opposite side, we have achieved balance. Yes, it’s rather boring overall, but your eye happily moves back and forth between the two dots, exploring the expanse of the image without undue distraction. Try to get a feeling for what your eye gravitates toward. Try squinting, too (I’m serious).

It can help to squint or tilt your head when evaluating more complex images to get a feeling for the dynamics at play. Let’s make things more interesting by adding a different visual element to try to balance the first dot.

Here, the dot is countered by a line. If you are already used to looking at compositions and evaluating balance, or if you are very relaxed, you will notice immediately that the dot is still pulling all the weight of this image. Even though a visual element was placed on the opposite side of the piece, the dot still has more weight because it’s larger and because it extends toward the edges of the frame, asserting its dominance in a way.

To balance this composition, we’ll have to add more.

In this final example, you can see how much more visual weight the array of lines carries. Your eye is drawn back and forth naturally and balance is restored. The complexity of the lines overlapping one another makes them more interesting to look at than the dot, which increases their weight. There are several variables that contribute to visual weight in a composition and I want to talk about three specific ones right now: scale, isolation, and convergence.

Scale

Scale was really the star of the balance discussion above. As I said, there are many ways of changing the balance of a piece. Scale is the simplest to understand and control. Scale refers to the size of visual elements in relation to one another and to the composition as a whole.

In a photograph, scale is modified through perspective—by moving closer to or farther from an object. Keeping scale in mind when you compose your frame is just another way to manipulate the balance and therefore the visceral effect your image will have on its audience.

Isolation

When elements stand out from their surroundings, it’s called isolation. We can manipulate isolation in a composition in a couple of ways. First, we can alter the surroundings of an object, and second, we can change the relative scales of the object and its surroundings. Both will have an effect on how isolated an element in the composition will appear to be.

The first example is exploring contrast between visual elements and their surroundings.

Notice how the first element is easily recognizable, though the second element stands out much more strongly from its surroundings. We would say that the second element is more isolated than the first, which makes it a stronger focal point in the composition.

The second example shown below explores the effect of scale.

You will notice that both elements in this example draw your eye. The first is quite large and occupies a significant area of the frame, which gives it weight. The second is much smaller, yet your eye is drawn to it because of the space around it¹; because of its isolation.

Our minds process visual information spatially². When we view an image, we are subconsciously comparing its parts to what we know of the world, trying to recognize objects and relationships between them. When presented with a shape surrounded by a field of color, our mind creates a three-dimensional understanding of the space, visualizing the shape as sitting on a field of color. If two shapes are presented adjacent to one another and they are of different sizes, our subconscious reaction is that the larger shape is closer to us. Isolation works because our minds are so adept at interpreting shapes and the space around them.

You could say that photography, and even art itself, is based on shapes and the space around them.

Convergence

Convergence could be called the most obvious way to affect the emphasis of a composition. Essentially, convergence describes elements that come together at a point, though they don’t have to touch in order to be convergent. Taking advantage of the eye’s fondness for following lines, convergence can cause the viewer to trace a certain path through a composition.

Convergence can be executed very subtly in a photograph, but for the sake of illustration I will use it boldly here.

Notice how your eye catches one of those lines at the left side and “rides” it right up to the dot on the right. It’s very natural to follow lines within a composition and learning to recognize when and how that happens will help you to strengthen yours. The dots are the same size, but the one on the right draws more weight and attention because of the lines leading into it.

The Final Project

We’ve really talked about a lot here today and I commend you if you’ve actually read all the way through! After working on this post for nearly three weeks, I finally had to come to terms with the fact that I could never make it as complete as I’d like. I will try to include the parts I skimmed over or left out in future additions to this series. Suffice it to say, art is a very big subject to try to cover in a simple blog post.

Rather than post a bunch of photos here and try to describe what’s happening in them compositionally, I challenge you, my readers, to do so as you browse through photos in the next few days. I imagine most of you look at photographs daily, either yours or others’, and I would be ecstatic to hear about how you’ve applied these concepts to the creation of your own images or the critique of others’.

If you leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail with your thoughts and reactions, I will put together a “wrap-up” post sharing those ideas with everyone. If you’re looking for stuff to critique, feel free to hammer away at my gallery!

Other great sources include the amazing PhotoSIG, obviously Flickr, and all of the amazing galleries on photo.net. I frequent these sites when I’m in need of inspiration.

1. The space around it is called negative space, which I’ll be talking about in much more depth later
2. Though some people process what they see more spatially than others; we call those people “right-brained” because the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for spatial recognition

Having spent most of my developing years surrounded by it, I have always taken for granted many of the fundamental guidelines of art. Perhaps due to the complexity of its technical aspects, formal photography courses tend to focus (no pun intended) on the equipment and techniques of creating images and not as much on their content.

Learning the traditional “rules” of art (or what I would call the rules of design) is important for two specific reasons. First and foremost, to make your work better. Following the rules—as well as judiciously breaking them—will strengthen your compositions, but you need to know what they are before you can do either. Second, to enhance your critiquing ability. By learning the basic terminology of art you will be able to take full advantage of critique from your peers as well as articulate your own.

So let’s get started! Today I’ll be discussing texture.

So what exactly is texture?

texture adj. (pl. textures)

1. The feel or shape of a surface or substance; the smoothness, roughness, softness, etc. of something

In painting, texture is sometimes used to add dimension to a piece beyond its mere color and shape. The technique of building up thick layers of paint to form raised peaks and waves is called impasto and has been in use for centuries. Masters such as Rembrandt as well as notable modern artists such as DeKooning were big fans of impasto. Light reflects off of the contoured surfaces of raised paint, sometimes casting small shadows, allowing the painter to create additional levels of realism in fabrics or to add the impression of motion.

In photography, texture can play a significant aesthetic role. With help from its best friend contrast (which I’ll cover in detail later), texture adds important tactile cues that can give the viewer an immediate experience of what they’re looking at.

Behold, Figure 1.

~~/SingleServings/2007/March/27Mar07-01.jpg~~

I made this photograph at the park in March while I was sitting around watching people fly their kites and throw their Frisbees. It’s actually my knee, clad in corduroy, but shot with my Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro lens. When I look at this image, I feel as though I could almost touch the surface of the material. I have a very real sense of what it would be like to touch it, and that’s the key to using texture.

I chose this photograph as an example not because it is a singular work of art, or even among my favorites, but because it exemplifies the use of texture as the subject; there is very little else in this image that is interesting. In post-processing (using Lightroom), I chose the “strong contrast” tonal curve preset, which deepens the shadows and boosts the highlights. Contrast and texture are intimately related because the cues that give us the impression of textures in an image are all formed through contrast. Keep that in mind.

Now, Figure 2.

~~/SingleServings/2007/March/27Mar07-02.jpg~~

Tree bark is a ubiquitous source of texture in photography—and for good reason. In this image, the light through the branches of the tree strongly reveals the bark’s texture because of its downward angle. Once again, using the tone curve adjustments in Lightroom allowed me to enhance the textural effect. I also used Lightroom’s built-in sharpening (which many in the field have criticized, but I like just fine thank you) to further punch up the roughness.

This is a good case of a subject that, from a distance and shot in a traditional way, would probably have yielded an image of limited interest. Especially considering the bright midday sun and stark shadows, it would be hard to achieve anything too pleasing. Keeping texture in mind, however, introduces new possibilities for using the situation to best advantage. Having a mental library of compositional techniques may allow you to make very nice photographs in locations or at times that are inappropriate for your preferred style.

Finally, Figure 3.

~~/SingleServings/2007/March/27Mar07-03.jpg~~

In the above piece, texture is only one player on a team of compositional tools including contrast, line, form, and depth; design elements that I will be discussing in more detail in future installments of this series. Once again focusing my post-processing efforts on the tone curve and sharpening tools, I have enhanced the prominence of the ground’s texture as well as the surface of the pole.

Speaking in purely photographic terms, capturing textures is tied most strongly to aperture. The above photograph was exposed at f/8, which was sufficient to keep the pole and nearby ground (where the texture was most interesting to me) in focus while still allowing the background to fall away into soft bokeh. Because texture does best at smaller apertures, textural images are best achieved under brighter conditions, which allows some of the best textural photographs to be made during the bright, raking light of the midday sun—a time of day scorned by landscape photographers the world over.

The aperture in SLR cameras always remains fully open to its widest setting so that the view through the eyepiece is as bright as possible. When you press the shutter button, your selected aperture setting is applied before the film or sensor is exposed, but you can’t see any of that because by then the shutter has been closed and the mirror flipped up. In order to get a better idea of what your textural subject will look like at different aperture settings, you should use the “aperture preview” button if you have one. This button, when held, will stop the aperture down to your selected setting. I use this button constantly.

You may have taken note of the fact that my three example photographs are in black and white. There is no reason that texture cannot be a prominent feature of a color photograph, but in my mind a photograph only deserves to be presented in color when the color itself is a prominent player. Also, black and white images have a more flexible tonal range because the underlying colors can be adjusted independently before the conversion to black and white. Lightroom handles this magnificently with its “Grayscale Mix” palette. With a broader tonal range to work with, your textures can be adjusted intricately.

Hopefully this article has given you a better understanding of the part texture can play in your images and how to enhance it by paying attention to contrast and tonality. In upcoming articles I will dive yet deeper into design concepts, so stay tuned, and feel free to bury me in questions and comments!