Editor's note: The 2026 class of my Lightroom Classic Secrets course is open for enrollment now. Learn the tips, techniques and secrets used by the Lightroom masters. Click here for the details. Thanks for reading, Andrew.
After encouraging you to turn last week’s article about color contrast into a creative exercise I thought I’d finish off the month with another one.
The aim is to explore five composition techniques that you can experiment with this year. We’ll move away from the rule of thirds and explore more advanced ideas. None of them are complex, but you may not be aware of them.
If any of these composition techniques don’t resonate with you feel free to replace them with some that do. The important thing is to come up with a list of composition ideas to practice this year. I’ve used my flower and garden photos to illustrate the techniques, but the ideas apply to any photography genre.
Composition technique #1: Show the environment
I often talk about simplicity in composition, but this composition technique is the opposite of that. It’s easy to simplify the composition by using a telephoto lens and a wide aperture to isolate the subject against the background. There’s nothing wrong with that and I use this technique a lot.
But for this exercise I’m asking you to think about ways you can show the subject’s environment instead. It doesn’t have to be completely in focus, but the aperture should reveal enough detail for the viewer to get a good sense of the environment.
You can see that idea at work in my photo of a butterfly below. The butterfly’s wings are the same color as the flower, and I wanted to show that and use the color contrast with the green background.
Don’t be afraid of complexity when you try this technique. Including the subject’s environment adds information to the composition. Do your best to impose some kind of order on that complexity, so that the photo looks composed.
Composition technique #2: Experiment with black and white
The next composition technique is one you can play with either when you make the photo or when you develop it.
At the developing stage, you can look through your photos to see which ones would work in black and white, and then make the conversion.
But it’s more interesting when you work in black and white at the photo making stage. This is how it went back in the film days. You had to decide whether to use color or black and white, and load the camera with the appropriate film.
Today, you can you set your digital camera to its black and white mode. Use the Raw format as it gives you more options in development, and also lets you make a color version of the photo.
If you have a digital SLR, you can review your black and white photos on the camera’s LCD screen to see if your compositions are working. You’ll see the scene in black and white if you’re using Live View.
With mirrorless cameras it’s even better because the camera displays the scene in black and white in the viewfinder. It’s a great aid to composition because you can see the scene in black and white.
This exercise makes you think about whether the photo would work well in black and white before you push the shutter. It encourages you to look beyond color for the elements that good black and white photos need, like texture, tonal contrast, line and shape. These are the building blocks of all good compositions, color as well as black and white.
Don’t be afraid to photograph subjects that most photographers would photograph in color. You’ll be surprised at how many work in black and white as well.
The photo below is a good example. Most photographers, myself included, would photograph an orange flower against a green background in color. It’s the perfect subject for color. But it also works well in black and white, as the converted photo shows.
Composition technique #3: Use diagonal lines
Have a look at this photo. Can you see the lines?
I’ve drawn them below. The flowers in the foreground form a horizontal line. So do the buildings in the background. The trees in the background created two vertical lines. The greenhouse makes a diagonal line that connects foreground and background.
The composition technique I’d like you to use is to find a way of including more diagonal lines. Diagonal lines pull the viewer’s eye through the photo. They are dynamic. They connect foreground and background. Compositions with diagonal lines have more energy.
Let’s see how this applies to this particular scene. Here it is, reframed with diagonal lines.
Can you see them? The diagram below shows the dominant lines. The plants in the foreground make a diagonal line leading to the greenhouse. The greenhouse is a short diagonal line leading to the house, which is another diagonal line.
You can also see diagonal lines at work in the photo above of a butterfly. The wisps of grass aren’t a major part of the composition, but they create powerful diagonals that add energy and motion to the composition.
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The photo of the orange flower I showed you above has a simple composition. There are just two elements – the orange flower and the green background. It’s a composition with two layers.
Composition gets more interesting and challenging when you add layers. Take a look at the photos below. They are multi-layered. They have a distinct foreground, middle-ground and background. The first photo has flowers in the foreground, a large building in the background, and a middle-ground in between.
The second has purple flowers in the foreground, a greenhouse and trees in the background, and space in-between.
This type of composition is more challenging because there are more elements at play. You have to think more about the composition, and look for ways to impose order and structure on a potentially chaotic scene.
The reward, when you get it right, is photos with more depth and visual interest.
I’ve drawn lines to show the distinction between foreground, middle-ground and background in both photos.
Composition technique #5: Isolate (in complex compositions)
I made the photo of the orange flower above with a 100mm macro lens (on an APS-C camera). The lens’s narrow field-of-view isolates the subject by excluding most of the scene.
But what happens when you use a lens with a shorter focal length, like a standard lens or a wide-angle? Unless you get ultra-close to the subject your composition includes more of the scene.
This has two effects. The first is that the composition is more complex, because there’s more stuff in the frame.
The second is that it’s harder to isolate the subject. You need to use other techniques. The most common is using a wide aperture to blur the background.
This uses a principle of visual weight, that sharp objects have more visual weight than unsharp ones. That helps push the viewer’s eye towards the subject, which is sharp. The photos below show how it works. I made both with a 35mm lens (APS-C) set to its widest aperture, f2.
This is a great technique for those of you with prime lenses, which have wider maximum apertures than zooms. But you can still make it work with zoom lenses, and with Micro four-thirds cameras, whose smaller sensors mean that photos have more depth-of-field at any given aperture.
The key is to set your lens to its widest aperture, and move as close to the subject as you can. If you’ve never tried this before you’ll be surprised how effective it is, even if you’re limited to an aperture of f4 or f5.6.
To help you get the most from these creative exercises I’ve created two printable worksheets that you can download using the links below. The first gives you space to write three things you learned from each exercise. The second gives you space to write down your photography related goals for 2026.
I’ve linked to the previous six creative exercises below so you can easily return to them.
If you liked the ideas in this article then you’ll love my new ebook 100 Composition Assignments. It’s like a workshop in your pocket, with 100 assignments to light a fire and help you improve your composition skills.
P.S. Read it first – Creative Photographer Club members get to read articles before anybody else. Click here for the details.
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