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Home Video Hints: The Seven Golden Composition Rules

Composition is such a powerful visual tool that we give it a lot of attention here at Videomaker. It's such a complex art that folks like Rembrandt and Ansel Adams practically made a career of it. (For our latest in-depth look, check You've Been Framed in the July 2001 issue and the Videomaker Web site.) Is composition, then, too sophisticated for the casual shooter?

Not a chance.

You don't need a home-study course in composition. All you need is a cheat sheet: a few simple reminders to guide your shooting something like Videomaker's infamous Seven Deadly Camera Sins. So let's name our new list, The Seven Golden Composition Rules. If you can remember, and use, the first four, you'll frame very respectable images. If you can add rules five through seven, you'll see dramatic improvement in your compositions. We've assembled The Seven Golden Composition Rules into a handy checklist. Here they are, explained briefly and painlessly.

Above all, use your viewfinder as a surface (like a photo or painting) you look at, instead of a window you look through. All composition creation takes place on that surface and within that two-dimensional frame. By squeezing the three-dimensional world down to two, you reduce real people and things to elements that you can deploy to create nice compositions.

If your camcorder has an external screen, use it all the time, except in light too bright to see it. If you have only an internal viewfinder, remind yourself that it's not a through-the-lens view; it's just a screen a tiny television. At first, you may just have to trust me that this is the most important rule of all; but as you get used to seeing the finder as a flat picture, you'll understand why this is the first of The Seven Golden Composition Rules.

By now, you've heard the famous Rule of Thirds: divide the frame into nine equal parts with an imaginary tick-tack-toe grid. Next, compose your images so that prominent elements (like subjects' eyes and horizons and trees) align, more or less, with the lines, while the most important ones of all fall on or near grid intersections. This rule is easy to apply and it works every time. (If you feel ambitious, make the Rule of Thirds screen overlay detailed in the July 2001 issue and practice with it.)

Understand that you don't have to have elements along all the lines and at every intersection, as long as your image's components at least roughly line up with the grid.

That doesn't mean a composition is automatically defective if it doesn't follow the holy Rule of Thirds; and yes, many beautiful compositions ignore this rule entirely. The Rule of Thirds is actually less a rule than an approach: organizing the frame asymmetrically, can guide you toward composing more interesting images.