We had a really great camera club meeting on Wednesday. There were some new faces as well as familiar ones. I started off the meeting with a 30 minute presentation on composition. Composition is an interesting topic for photographers. It is the study of what to include and sometimes more importantly what not to include in your photograph. Take, for instance, this photograph I took at the Windman Triathlon in Los Banos.

I entered this photograph into the Camera club contest in the Journalism category. I really liked the early morning light and the anticipation of the racers trying to understand the race course. Some racers looked almost frightened to see the floating markers so far off in the distance. I felt this photograph told that story well and titled the photograph “Scoping out the Racecourse”.

I liked the way the dock cut across the frame at a diagonal, which is a powerful compositional element, but the hills in the background and water line were both horizonal lines indicating peace. The racers standing on the dock interrupted this peaceful line with stark vertial lines. I also liked the reflection of the swimmers mirrored in the water. I didn’t pay too much attention to the photograph otherwise as I was pretty late assembling my submission for the contest.

After giving my talk on composition, however, I realized there were a few problems with the photograph that I had submitted. We had a guest judge, and he noticed those things as well. These were the things I was marked down for:

1. There is too much white sky in the photo. The sky is uninteresting and is blown out. There is a lack of color or texture in the sky and it takes up entirely too much of the photograph.
2. The first light on the hillside was a distraction for the judge. This didn’t bother me as much.
3. I totally cut off the reflection of most of the swimmers. This reflection could have been an impactful compositional element. Instead I tried to keep the heads of the swimmers near the top line of the rule of thirds and I ignored the other compositional elements.

While I can do some cropping of the image, I can’t get back the lost reflections (without some work in Photoshop). I did try to rework this photo and crop out a good deal of the sky and lose some of the lighting on the hills. I think this photograph is quite different than the first. The close cropping of the people gives me a “penned in” feeling rather than the spaciousness and the depth that the first photograph had.

A better option photographically would be to reshoot this photo but as this was a “live” event I can’t recreate the scene easily. The participants moved off the dock shortly after I took this picture and I lost the opportunity to be creative with this shot.

Composition is a subject that needs to be visited and re-visited for photographers. The more that we can practice good composition the more it will become second nature. Practicing composition can definitely help increase the ratio of “keepers” verses rejects.