The Composition Killer Ruining Your Photos You Can Easily Fix Today

It doesn't matter how good your composition is if you have this one glaring error. Take a look to see what it is, if you're guilty of doing it, and how to fix it.

Everything begins with composition. That's the mantra that was pathologically drilled into me when I was starting out with photography many decades ago. And it's true. Almost every great photo across a wide range of genres will have a fundamentally solid composition. But what does that mean exactly?

Stripping things back to the rawest of basics, composition is how you position all of the elements in your frame. What are elements? They are all of the things that you choose to include in your frame, and the shining star of those elements is your subject. Take a look at this image below, for an example.

The elements in this image are the sky, the sun, the trees and shrubs on the right and left, the river and the reflection, and the boat, which is the subject. Thus, in total, there are five elements in this image.

Going back to composition, how we decide to position these elements in the frame is often what makes or breaks an image.

In the image above, I placed the sky in the top third of the frame and made sure the front of the boat was angling directly toward the sun. I also ensured that the line tying the boat down was entering the frame from the bottom left corner, almost in a straight line with the direction the boat is pointing. On this day, I took about 15 images of the boat, all from different angles, in order to determine the best composition and work out how each element could complement my subject.

But there's a bigger issue at play here, and it's one you can't see. And the reason you can't see it is because it isn't there.

I'm not being cryptic. I'm talking about distractions.

What Are Distractions?

Distractions are parts of the frame that take the viewer's eyes and attention away from the most important elements in your frame, particularly the subject. When you take a photo and make critical decisions about what to include, what to exclude, and where to position your elements, you also have to be extremely critical in eliminating anything from the frame that isn't strengthening your composition or providing a point of interest.

So many potentially wonderful images I see from incredibly talented photographers are often ruined because they haven't been critical enough in removing distractions. The result is that the viewer's eyes keep involuntarily going back to those distractions rather than resting on the intended points of interest.

For a crude example, think of a big pimple on the end of a model's nose (male or female). Can you imagine opening a glossy magazine and flipping to a double-page spread of a gorgeous model and seeing a whopping great yellow pimple staring back at you from the tip of their nose? I guarantee that no matter how mesmerizing that model's look might be, your eyes would keep coming back to rest on that mini-volcano of pus. Distractions in our images have the same negative impact.

Let me give you a few visual examples so you can see what I'm talking about.

The photo above of my wife and two daughters was taken at a seaside shrine not far from my home here in the south of Japan. It's a lovely location and offers endless opportunities for portraits, landscapes, and architectural images. On this day, I was there to celebrate my youngest daughter turning three.

You can see where I've put some green circles to denote all the distractions. I could have added a few more but from this, you can see how critical I am when I scan my eyes through the frame looking for things that strengthen the image or detract from the image. When I make choices about what I want to keep or remove, I always ask myself the same question: does this element add a point of interest or complement my subject? If the answer's no, I remove it.

The first tool I use is always the crop tool. I've written here about why you should always consider starting with the crop tool. You can see the initial edits I started with below.

After that, I use a variety of tools to clean up the image, including the Patch tool, the Content-Aware tool, the Healing Brush tool, the Spot Healing Brush tool, and the Clone Stamp tool, to name a few. Here is the finished image below.

When you look at this image compared with the first one, it's amazing how many things I had to clean up that you may not have picked up on when you first glanced at that initial image. But that's the point with removing distractions: get rid of anything that provides an opportunity for the viewer to rest their eyes away from what you want them to look at.

In the image above, you might scan the frame and move around to different points, but you will invariably come back and rest your eyes on my daughter looking directly into the camera. And that's what you want your viewer to do - anchor their eyes on the various points of rather than distractions you've been too lazy to remove.

Let me give you one more example to make things emphatically clear and to show you that this applies to any genre of photography.

Though this is a surfing image, the problem of distractions is evident. I have put a red circle around all the elements in the frame I believe are taking attention away from the surfer riding the wave.

Of course, what you determine a "distraction" and what I do might sometimes differ, but the questions you have to ask yourself are always the same, which I touched on earlier. And in circling the distracting elements in the image above, I'm confident that none of them are either strengthening the image or complementing the subject.

Here is the finished image below, after I've cleaned up the distractions.

Like the first portrait example I used earlier, your eyes might look at this image and dance around different parts of the frame, but they will typically come back to rest on the surfer. Why? Because I've deliberately taken away the other choices.

Summing Up

Distractions exist in all forms of art. Editors of novels talk of how they continuously have to tell writers to get rid of red herrings or characters that do nothing to move the plot forward or add interest to the protagonists. And so it is with photography.

When you sit down to edit, you need to ask yourself three things:

1. What is my subject?

2. Which elements complement my subject?

3. Which elements do not relate to the first two questions above.

Once you've identified everything in your frame that belongs to question three, it's time to start cleaning.

Be critical and remove distractions before you allow them to distract your viewers.