Composition Week: Centering

Welcome back to the second day of composition week. Today we’re going to talk about centering.

“But wait,” I hear the more attentive among you shout, “yesterday you told us about the rule of thirds, and how we should avoid centering our subject in the image.”

Well yes, and no. Sometimes centering can work to our advantage. At the end of last month I shared this photo:

You can see that I centered the subject of my image. Here’s another example, before I spend a few paragraphs explaining myself:

In both of these images I centered the subject because it helps to accentuate the architectural detail. There’s a couple other things that help us here.

First the size of the subject relative to the frame. It’s large enough that it fills about a third of the frame. It’s big enough in the image that we don’t need to put it off center to draw the eye out to the edges of our picture.

Second, there’s enough visual complexity that the subject can stand on it’s own. There are enough details across the object that you necessarily have to look in different places in the frame to see everything.

Third, and finally for today, there’s the symmetry of the subject. We’ll discuss symmetry in another post, but for now, it’s enough to say that the image could feel unbalanced if we didn’t use the center of the photo as the center of the symmetry.