Composition – the art of shooting people and cutting their heads off

 

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Have you seen the portrait of igor Starvinsky at the piano by Arnold Newman? Have you seen it before the crop ?

Composition is in a way getting the right amount of information. Not too little , nothing more .  Someone once said “take all that is not essential out of the photo  then take some more out” .

When one starts on photography,  one  starts with centring the subject , then move on to rule of thirds , golden ratio and what not . There are rules and there are rules . If photography is an art, rules are there to be broken . Beyond rules exists the art .

HCB (Henrie Cartier Bresson) said this right , when he said “it is never about the photograph , it is all about the subject” . Then his was different kind of photography and he was a different kind of a photographer , at a time where only a few men stood behind a lense pressed the trigger and rushed to a dark room. But I think he had the right idea, generally speaking. And to take all that effort , and to cut off the photo to reveal only the essential takes courage.

But a shadow of a slender hand in a washed blue wall background and a leg with a skirt, the leg and the stilts of a flamingo dancer speaks at the right level than her face .

Times are indeed different now .

But I guess, irrespective of times , to shoot people and then to cut their heads off takes courage .

There’s another angle to look at composition . To see gather all that is necessities in to a frame . I guess my album illustrates more of that .  I include them not to show how to do it right , but to show what could have been even better.

First one was taken in Macau. I saw this Rickhaw puller from far and ran towards him . And this is the best I could take . If I had a zoom lense and if the road ahead was void the of the ugly truck. Better still if I could get a glimpse of an interesting landmark through the framing. May be  of St Paul’s ruins … Sometimes one goes overboard when wishing .

The second one was taken in Sri Lanka. It was Sunday and market day in Nuwaraeliya. I shot this through the canopy of the temporary stalls. I would have preferred a more interesting face or a gesture to be revealed through the gap a kid looking up at me , an old woman … may be.

 

Last one , I like how it turned out . I wanted to show the size of St Paul’s . Also how life has grown around it , how life goes on around it . But if I could do it again I would visit early in the morning and wait for the morning routines and try to capture them .  May be there will be bicycles and steam from the bowls of noodles as the day starts unfolding … And would make a different image altogether.