The Key to Understanding Photography and Composition feat. Master Photographer Huntington Witherill

The Key to Understanding Photography and Composition feat. Master Photographer Huntington Witherill

We’re bringing you composition and photography tips from Master Photographer Huntington Witherill an award-winning photographer who also shares his experiences working with Ansel Adams. He simplifies and brings clarity to how to make outstanding images. He’s also is quoted in Marc Silber’s book Advancing Your Photography, which you can read for some more insight from Huntington and advice to help you Advance your Photography. 

In the meantime, here is some insight from Huntington:

How Your Camera Sees

First, knowing exactly what your camera sees is vital for capturing outstanding images. One of the keys to composition and photography, in general, is to learn how to see as your camera sees. This means that you’re taking your time to pay attention to what you’re photographing. To do this, you need to learn a number of things. One of which is that camera does not see as you see. A perfect example of this is when you can go out on a bright sunny day. It’s great to the eyes and we love to see a nice bright sunny day. But that’s not necessarily the best light for the camera to see.

So, learning to see as the camera sees enables you to take a scene and understand how to translate that through the photographic process to produce a photograph that has the emotional and visual content you desire.

Formulating and Resolving Composition

When we talk about photography and composition, the most enticing aspect is the puzzle of formulating and resolving composition. This is the deciding part of your photography. I love doing that and I tend to do it, whether I’m photographing or not. As I sit here and look out the window or whatever it is that I do, I’m constantly framing up the world, and kind of organizing it in my mind. And I just love doing that. 

Ansel does this well while training photographers during his workshop. He would hand out framing cards on the first day of his workshop. He would ask everybody to put their camera away and hands out these cardboard cutouts with a rectangle in them just to train the eye. 

I used to do something similar as well to train my eyes. I walked around for years with what was called a spectra-monochromatic viewing filter. It was a very small dark brown filter that I had taped off with some electrical tape into a small rectangle. When I put it up to my eye it would take the color out of the scene and then frame up the scene. What it does is that it teaches you how to see what’s going on at the edges of the frame. 

Looking for Composition?

Here’s another great tip on photography and composition I learned from Ansel. He pointed out that too often when students are out looking for a composition, they would take their camera, put it here next to them and they’d start setting it up. Then they would take a picture. But by looking through the camera they discover that they don’t have the right scene.  Then they change position so many times until they get the best scene. This is what Ansel called the pogo-stick approach to photography. It is the approach where you put the tripod here try it and if that didn’t work, put the tripod elsewhere and if that didn’t work, you try it many times over until it works. But the easiest thing which is key is to just decide on the basis of the one eye that you’re looking with where does it best.

The Right Approach

You know, when the scene looks right to you on the basis of that, you put the lens right there – where your eye is. That is where the camera needs to be exactly.  So, that keeps you from having to jump around trying a lot of different compositions. The rule is, where the lens actually is in space determines what the composition is. If you move the lens even an inch or two to one side or up or down it can quickly change the composition. 

I used to take those cards that Ansel hands out at this workshop. Usually, depending on how far you place it from your eye, you can tell if you want to get the effect of a telephoto. Depending on the distance you place it from your eye, you can have different focal lengths. You could do this without having to set up the camera and change lenses all the time. You could figure out exactly what you needed just by using that little card. That’s why it was so effective. 

Cropping and Composition

Here’s what I also normally do when composing a photograph: I always do some form of cropping. The reason for this is that not every natural scene on the planet fits into the 8 by 10 format. Some scenes require a little bit more this way and a little bit more that way.

So, when I’m composing the images, I use the lens or the point of view which produces the image right out to the edge of the frame. I do this depending upon which is the larger of the two in terms of whether it’s the top to bottom proportion or the left. Then I end up cropping the other dimension after. What this does is that it allows you to work with the reality that not every scene fits into the 8×10 proportion. It also allows you to use the scene to its maximum on at least one dimension; whether it’s the horizontal or the vertical. And then crop out the others later so that you can get the best optical quality with your camera. 

Final Piece of Advice

Here’s my final piece of advice to help you advance your photography. I think patience and persistence are the keys to producing good photographs. You know I’ve spent more than 50 years now photographing and I’ve done so every day for the past 50 years plus. If you do something that much, even somebody like me can do it fairly decently. So persistence and patience are vital; just don’t give up. Keep shooting; that’s the key.

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