My good friend Bill Gillock has very graciously allowed me to use an answer to his question for this post. He had put together a composite image from a limited number of old family photos, and asked my opinion. Now I was pretty mean to Bill, but, I’m mean to all my friends, so don’t get the wrong idea. But because I get a lot of questions on compositions and more so because I see a lot of unattractive compositions I tried to help. So here’s his original composition….
This is what I said about it.
Not to be mean, Bill, your poster is technically workable…. but aesthetically it’s just not very good.
I want you to look at the overall composition.
Part of what we find attractive in a composition is our eyes know where to go. They intuitively know from the composition what they are supposed to be looking at; what you want them to see.
As a metaphor, imagine you are in a room with a group of people. All of them are talking at once at the same volume. This is confusing because you don’t know to whom you’re supposed to be listening. You would prefer one person to talk with the other to be silent, or at least not talk at the same volume. Then you would know who to listen to. As human beings, our deepest desire in life is for order, not chaos.
But in this composite all the pictures are speaking at once, and they are all about the same volume. Your composition lacks a clearly defined hierarchy. There is no dominate image supported by lesser images.
In composite images that hierarchy could be achieved by…
- one larger image surrounded by several smaller images,
- one color image surrounded by b&w images.
- one lighter image surrounded by images that are not as bright.
- one area or image in sharp focus while the rest is soft or even blurry.
- the best (most attractive image) surrounded by the less attractive ones.
- the most recent image surrounded by ones that are obviously older.
- the image with the largest head size.
- the only image making eye contact with the viewer.
Your viewer needs to know where you want him to look. But in your image, our eyes are conflicted, in that they don’t know whether to go to this center image or to all this color. A much better situation would be if you had one centered color image surrounded by black and white images.
Moving on…. It’s sooooooo symmetrical. And remember symmetrical is a Cherokee word for boring. Any sort of break in this symmetry would help. Notice we have a left/right couch shots, a left/right little kid shots, a left/right portrait shots. At the very least try putting one of the couch pictures in the bottom corner and one of the portraits in a top corner.
Something you have done right, is you’ve got the two lower images looking inward. Which serves to keep our eyes on the page. If you had these two switched the effect would be much worse, our eyes would be drawn off of the page.
And then….It’s tooooo centered. We’re not married to the RULE OF THIRDS, but We MUST leave the RULE OF PERFECTLY CENTERED.
This over centeredness makes the compostion appear overly structured. A tight, un-yielding grid. This looks like a pleasant person. If you were to take the center image and rotate it so it isn’t straight up and down, a little askew… the whole thing portrays a more spontaneous, fun sort of flavor.
The color balance for all the images is disharmonious. The bottom right image is more or less correctly color balanced, but this only makes things worse by giving us something to directly compare all the other faded, color-shifted photos to. Get a reasonable color balance on the other images, adjust their saturation so they all have about the same degree of saturation, probably a little lower than normal. If, for whatever reason, you just can’t get an attractive color balance from one of the images, desaturate it to black and white.
I would also encourage you to crop the two couch pictures a little tighter so we loose that big, noisy, ugly green wall over the couches, and crop the magenta mush portrait so you loose part of the blank background. Not too tight, we need a little breathing room, but tighten up a little.
To me, the lower right image is the strongest. Why don’t you enlarge it considerably (compared to the rest), then use Photoshop’s Extract filter to dropout the background, then make that image lay over several of the others. You might even try a drop shadow on that image so it extends forward from the others.
You might(your call) also improve that bottom right image by Clone Stamping out the vertical furrows in her brow, then take the image into the Liquify filter, to just slightly make her look less disapproving.
Anyway,I know this was a little tough, but hey; you’re a tough guy. And your stuff deserves a composition that helps rather than hurts your pictures.
D.H.
