So What’s with All These “Rules”?
Rules and creativity go together about as well as. . . well, two things that don’t really go well together at all. And the “rules of composition” are probably one of the hottest button topics in the realm of photography. No one can bring themselves to deny them, but it seems everyone tries to explain them away; “Oh, think of them more like guidelines.” What, have we all suddenly turned into pirates? (Or sometimes they refer to them as “techniques,” but then I couldn’t have made my pirate joke) No one tells an engineer to think of mathematics as “guidelines.” So what’s going on and why does it seem like everyone is so afraid to tell the truth about “compositional rules”?
Tree on a Hill
I get it, creatives don’t like being told what to do or how to do it (which makes it ironic how popular tutorial videos are among the YouTube photographer set and how many photographers bow at the altar of the IG AI). Rules imply constraint, what can and can’t be done, and words like “guidelines” and “techniques” are disarming. There are no constraints in art, and therefore none in photographic composition. So compositional rules often get a handwavy treatment and we’re told to sometimes “break” the rules. Maybe we’re holding on to all these rules, so we have something to “break,” to feel like a rebel, a true artist? Is any of this truly helpful if we don’t know what the rules mean?
Notice I didn’t say what the rules ARE, but what the rules MEAN. It is of course important to know what the rules are, but more importantly, we should understand what they mean. And it’s not what you think (or maybe it is what you think and you’re just humoring me by continuing to read this), because the rules aren’t about you, the photographer. They’re about the image, or more specifically, the image’s relationship with the viewer. Rules of composition help the viewer understand what we are trying to say through our images, and it’s important to know what the rules mean, so we can accurately communicate what we’re trying to say to the viewer.
Going back to our math analogy (yeah, I used a math analogy up there at the beginning), if I want to draw a triangle, I draw a shape with three sides. Why? Because the “rule” is that triangles have three sides. It’s important to know that triangles have three sides. Why? So I can draw triangles. Now maybe I want to be “creative” by breaking that rule and I draw my triangle with four sides. No matter how much I may want to be the artistic rebel, I haven’t broken any rules at all. I’ve just followed a different rule that you, the viewer, can use to tell that I’ve actually drawn a square. And how do you know that? Because there’s another rule that says squares have four sides (yes, I know there is more to being a square than just having four sides (like pointing out that there’s more to being a square than just having four sides), just go with me on this).
To be clear while you may not be able to “break” the rules per say, you can use them badly to create a terrible composition. So yes, you CAN “technically” break the rule of triangles by drawing three lines that don’t connect, but then you’ve just drawn a broken triangle, because you tried breaking a rule without understanding its meaning. This is why it’s important to understand what the rules mean.
White Tulip
Compositional rules aren’t about what a photographer can or can’t do, they’re only a set of instructions, a “Visual Language” if you will, that helps us understand what the photograph is saying (Interestingly enough, although I initially wrote this over a month ago, at the time of posting, I’ve just seen two other videos on the topic of “visual communication,” one from Ted Forbes over at The Art of Photography, and the other on Alex Kilbee’s, The Photographic Eye. Both are worth a watch.). They’re not guidelines or suggestions or techniques to bend to our will, they’re tools we can choose to use or not use, in different ways and combinations, to help the person seeing our photograph understand what we are trying to say. You can’t “break” any of the rules of composition because the rules aren’t about us. You can only choose which ones you want to use, and if you put that flower in the middle of the frame, I’m sorry to say that you haven’t broken any rules. You’ve just used a different rule and have chosen to say something completely different.
Enough of my rambling on. If you really want to know what the rules MEAN, you need to check out Pat Kay’s series about Visual Patterns on his YouTube channel. I mean it. Right now, stop reading this and go watch him. You’ll thank me for it.
Why are you still here?