Outdoor Photography How To

Danish photographer Mads Peter Iversen thinks composition is so important to landscape photography, he’s made several photography tips videos about the subject. In his latest video below, Iversen discusses three composition tips he thinks are key to making a successful image.

“Composition either makes or breaks your landscape photography,” Iversen says. “In this video I give you three tips on composition. These tips should be seen more as tools, since you can use them to compose your photo.”

While his general composition tips might already be familiar to you, Iversen does an excellent job of showing how important they are in this tutorial with the help of his own lovely image examples.

His first tip involves framing, which he says can be done with a number of different objects in an image, including trees, light, clouds, mountains or even the ground. These are the rudiments of both classical and natural framing in photography.

But you can also use something as simple as a vignette to create framing in an image to emphasize your subject.

“That’s exactly what vignetting does,” Iversen notes. “It frames the picture to bring more attention to the middle part of the picture. If you go for a strong central composition, then the vignetting often hugely benefits the picture."

His second composition tip is to “turn your object/subject the ‘right way,’” in an image. What does he mean by this?

“I basically mean that the perceived front of your subject or object should be turned into the photo,” he says, while showing images where a church and a bird are facing out of the photo, which he says creates “unease.” Conversely, when the subject is turning into the photo, it conjures feelings of tranquility and balance.

In his final tip, Iversen tackles the evergreen subject of using “negative space” in an image to create a unique composition. Negative space, in art, is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image; i.e. the white or blank space that serves as a backdrop or a virtual canvas for the subject matter of your photo.

For instance, one of his images he shows is of horses running in a snowstorm. “You use negative space to emphasize your focal point,” he says.

Watch the video below for more details and photo examples and check out these 5 earlier composition tips from Iverson to improve your landscape photography. You can see more of his videos on his YouTube channel.

Via Imaging Resource