Composition is not a recipe
What Edward Weston knew about rules
Rule of thirds. Leading lines. Negative space. We learn composition as a set of rules, and the idea is simple: follow them and the photograph improves.
I came across a thought from photographer Edward Weston that stuck with me. He called composition something personal, something you develop alongside your technique. Your own way of seeing, not a checklist of rules.
Someone once looked at a great many strong photographs and spotted a pattern. That’s probably how the rule of thirds came about. An observation made after the fact, not a law handed down beforehand.
And that’s usually where it goes wrong. We reverse the order. You place your subject neatly on a third and the photograph still feels empty. The rule checks out. Something’s missing, and that something is exactly what Weston is pointing at.
Two photographers on the same bridge. Same heron, same cyclist (something I wrote about in last week’s post Two ways of seeing). Same rules within reach. Yet two completely different photographs come out of it. That’s not down to who knows the rules better.
The good news is that a way of seeing isn’t fixed. Weston calls composition “strong or weak” depending on the individual, but nowhere does he say it’s inborn. It grows simply by starting. Clumsily, feeling your way, noticing what you keep being pulled towards. That’s exactly why a daily practice pays off: not because it makes you better at following rules, but because it’s the only way to find out what you yourself keep noticing, with no one looking over your shoulder.
RBNXPLRNG works well for me for that reason. A random route strips you of the “right” location. No cherry-picked golden hour, no famous viewpoint.
Do that long enough and a pattern emerges on its own. Not borrowed, but built.
What’s left, I think, is this: you don’t need the rules to be a photographer, but you do need your own way of seeing. At best, the rules are a rough map, drawn by someone who happened to explore a different territory than yours.
Next time a photograph checks every technical box but still does nothing, that’s usually the moment a borrowed rule stood in for a decision you hadn’t actually made yourself.
See you next week.
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The specific phrase, rule of thirds, slightly predates photography and, if I’m not mistaken, is coined in reference to landscape painting. But, yes, it was more of a phrase after the fact surveying “successful” paintings.
Related: the same can be said of the Golden Ratio in art, except most “successful” works don’t follow it.
Yes! A sense of composition comes within, from experience, from a sensibility. If I stopped to think about rules, lines, and whatnot I'd never be able to make a photograph.