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Preface

“A picture is a poem without words”

—Horace, Roman lyric poet

No matter what type of camera you’re using, and this most definitely includes smartphones, there are two key skills you must master to make creative photos that you and others will love: how you compose your image, coupled with your use of light.

These skills have been with us ever since the first caveman had a breakthrough and figured out that scratches on a cave wall could communicate to others what he saw or imagined.

This breakthrough of picture making, and others that followed, opened the way to a most powerful urge we all share: to tell our stories to others. It must have been an exhilarating moment when that door began to open and, like our modern tech breakthroughs, it no doubt spread through the other caves at lightning speed! Imagine you and I in a cave, now having the ability to tell each other about what we each saw and even felt. Since we were using pictures, we were able to break though the communication barriers of our limited language.

From that moment, man had a superior communication system to all other life forms on the planet: as individuals, groups, and as a species we could now tell stories to each other in picture form.

But soon, it was not enough to just crudely scratch. Being what we are, man is always looking for the secrets to effectively tell stories. From scratches to rock art, they kept pushing the available technology further and further. And this very definitely embraced composition: how these pictures depicted and reflected life all around them.

Moving forward through the ages, all advances of picture making built on and expanded these initial breakthroughs. The urge to make pictures and share them with others runs deep within mankind. When you take the very long view, is it any surprise to see the explosions we’ve witnessed with our “modern” picture sharing outlets of YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and whatever else has come along by the time you read this?

When photography was first being developed in the mid-nineteenth century, by early pioneers such as Louis Daguerre who invented the “daguerreotype,” exposure time could be about fifty seconds to ten minutes, and the developing process was very complex. These early versions of photography were complicated and cumbersome, so the average person was not going to go through the painstaking process to make a single photograph of sometimes questionable quality. It was easier to stick with drawing, sketching, or possibly painting as the available technologies of the common person at the time.

A major breakthrough came when George Eastman (who went on to found Kodak in 1888) embraced photography and figured out a means to put a camera in the hands of anyone in the western world, have them take photographs, and then make prints easily and quickly. This again resonated deeply and it seemed that everyone soon had a camera. From the release of the inexpensive Kodak “Brownie” in 1900, to the much more sophisticated models, photography had become mainstream, which was a major advance in story telling and sharing through pictures.

This boom in photography kept right on going like a massive ocean swell that surfers love so much: a long beautiful ride—that is, up until the year 2000, the peak of film photography, when an estimated 85 billion photos were taken that year alone.

The newest technology, which had been in its crude infancy, was now coming of age and beginning to be a viable alternative to film. This resulted in a whole new swell on a new order of magnitude with digital photography. Now you could forget about taking your rolls of 12 or 36 exposures to the drug store or camera shop to get them developed: you could look at them instantly on the back of your camera. And when other breakthroughs of the Internet intersected with this, the door opened to instant sharing of our stories anywhere on the planet. A long way from one caveman to another, but nonetheless the same urge.

Then the biggest breakthrough to date occurred in 2007 when Steve Jobs released the iPhone. For the first time in history we had a workable camera that you were always going to take with you everywhere, because it was your phone. The genie was out of the bottle and advances in all smartphones have continued at an ever-increasing rate. Now we have a whole new order of magnitude of picture-making, with an estimated 1.2 trillion photos to be taken this year alone, as of this writing. Compared to the peak of film, there’s an increase of fourteen times. But with this explosion of photography and the number of pictures being taken and shared, is the quality of the work going up commensurately? Doubtful, right?

With all these technological advances driving our seemingly unquenchable thirst to make and share pictures, there are fundamental skills that are required to tell the story that both you and others will love. As you’ve seen, it’s not about the latest technological breakthrough, because at every point in man’s sentient history there has been an adequate means to make pictures and share them.

But what makes the difference between a snapshot that you take and a real photograph that you create? The first answer is visualization, which I covered in detail in my last book Advancing Your Photography. A photographer, who controls the process, first gets a vision of the image he or she wants to create and then takes steps to capture it.

This leads us to the next answer, which is the subject of this book. When you capture a photograph, you are composing a two-dimensional image within the frame of your camera.

This reveals a key skill that man has been using (or not) since those first scratched drawings: composition. When that first cave artist discovered that there were techniques to change perspective, dimension, viewpoint, and—most of all—emotion, this was the moment that art was born. Now it was the artist who could interpret life and show others what they saw and even felt.

I wanted to take a very long look, so that you can see we’re dealing with the deepest of subjects when we’re talking about composition, which is why I decided to tackle it with this new book. My goal is to give you a set of tools for composition in one compact handbook that you can carry with you on your journeys and refer to often, like your favorite cookbook in your kitchen, or—stating it another way—a large set of tools in your kit.

Here’s to your discovery of new skills and continued advancing

of your photography.

Marc Silber

Carmel, CA