Home Video Hints: The Seven Golden Composition Rules (page 2)

Beginners often frame subjects with their eyes too near the center of the image, leaving far too much room over their heads and creating seriously clunky compositions. (Seven Deadly Camera Sins refers to this as "head hunting.") In any shot from big closeup (eyes to chin) to full shot (head to foot), keep the subject's eyes on or above the upper horizontal line of the tick-tack-toe grid. Obviously, the rule doesn't apply to wide shots, where the subjects are relatively small.

And, as long as we're here, a quick bonus tip: in big closeups, you can cut off the tops of people's heads, but not their chins. No one quite understands the psychological reasons for this, but try it and you'll see. A subject scalped by the frame is okay, but a chin that continues off the bottom of the image looks amateurish.

Try to place subjects in the frame off-center, toward the side opposite the direction they're moving (or just looking, if they're staying in one place.) Professionals call the former "lead room" and the latter "look room." In most cases, a subject moving or looking toward, say, the right edge of the frame, doesn't need to be too far to the left just enough to open up some extra air ahead of them. (By the way, this rule extends to non-human subjects, like moving cars.)

Maintaining lead room has another advantage: as you pan with a moving subject, you don't have to keep it identically framed if you allow it extra room to move in.

As you know, your camcorder lens produces wide-angle images when zoomed out and telephoto images when zoomed in. (In the center of its zoom range it produces "normal" images that approximate the image magnification and perspective of human vision.) Both wide-angle and telephoto settings are easier to use in creating compositions.

Wide-angle lens settings exaggerate apparent depth. Parallel lines rush together in the distance. Repeated verticals like phone poles shrink dramatically as they recede. By dramatizing perspective effects, wide-angle settings suggest ways to use them in your compositions.

To take just one example, diagonal lines make wonderful pointers that lead the eye from the frame edge to the center of interest. If you have a subject posed before a railing, move around to the side and frame a wide angle shot with the top of the railing swooping forward and out of frame. The strong diagonal will take the eye right to the subject.

Telephoto lenses offer very different possibilities. Because they suppress apparent depth, they remind you that you build compositions out of pictorial elements on a flat plane and inside a defining frame. To put it another way, long lenses turn volumes into shapes, and shapes are the raw components of graphic design.

As an experiment, try zooming to full telephoto and then spending half an hour creating compositions on the picture plane. (Obviously, this exercise works better outdoors.) You'll find all kinds of possibilities in the strange Flatland you're framing in your finder.

One caution: there's no point in using the digital zoom feature on your camcorder because it does not make the lens setting "more telephoto." Digital zoom works by electronically enlarging the center of the image.

After wide and telephoto lenses, the next big sources of great compositions are unusual angles especially high and low ones. Most amateurs walk around looking at people and scenes. When they spot something to shoot, they raise the camcorder to eye level and blaze away. The resulting angles of the footage are always the same.

This practice was defensible before external LCD viewing screens; but today you can hold the camera high above your head with the screen tilted down, or walk along with your rig a foot above the ground.

High angles are indispensable in crowd situations. I recently shot a parade by holding the camera high above my head with the finder angled downward for viewing. At the other extreme, since many casual shooters have small children, grandchildren or pets, low angles offer fresh perspectives on these wonderful sawed-off critters.

If you want to get really creative, you can make hand-held boom shots that look quite professional. To boom up from a very low angle to a high one, set your low camera position, using your free hand to hold onto the outer edge of the external screen. Now roll the shot and after a few seconds of the low angle, slowly and steadily raise the camcorder as high as you please. The trick is to continuously adjust the viewfinder as the camera rises, so that you can always see it clearly. To complete the effect, stop when you get a good high-angle composition and roll a few seconds more. This trick also works just as well in reverse, from high to low angle.

Finally, look for foreground frames in which to place the subjects of your composition. Windows, doors, arches, road overpasses any kind of opening large or small can enclose your image in a foreground shape that draws attention to the center of interest in the middle.

Compositional frames have two main uses. First, by emphasizing the foreground, they enhance the feeling of depth in the image. At the same time, they can fill out a composition that works great, except for all that empty sky at the top.

And there you have it. We hope that our seven golden composition rules will help you in your ongoing quest toward video perfection.

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