The Parts Off A Photograph

I decided to write about this because i see a lot of new photographers giving to much importance to secondary things and not enough importance to the main things in a photo.

The parts of a photograph are prioritized according to a hierarchy of value.
#1 is the most important and the rest go down in importance.

  1. Content
  2. Composition, actually composition is incorrect it’s Framing
  3. color
  4. light and shadows
  5. Foreground, middle ground and background
  6. Rule of thirds and the rest of the rules

Content is the main part, without a good content there’s no use getting the rest of the parts in order, it’s a waste of time, you can not make a good photo just by composition, color etc etc or all the rules in the world, if you have a bad content you have a bad photo no matter how much you work on the other parts.
What is good content?
It all depends on the type of photography but in this case i will just refer to street photography or documentary photography.

The ingredients of good content are;

  1. A main subject, all photos have to have a main subject or like i like to say a hero or a villain, the main character of the photo, and it has to be interesting in some manner, either by what he/she is doing or what he/she is wearing or something, just a regular person without any special or different characteristics is not a good subject.
  2. Interesting, this is the opposite of boring when you are about to take a photo think first if it’s going to be a boring photo. Street photography is not about just taking pictures of people in the streets, it’s about taking photos of interesting people in the streets.
    Synonyms of interesting could be… different, weird, exotic, eccentric, doing strange things, elegance etc.
  3. Your mind has to be focused on the #1 ingredient or in the content first, and forget about the others, and there is a very good reason to forget about the other less important characteristics of a photo and that is because if you are focusing on composition or converging lines then you will miss the good photo, you will probably have only 1/2 of a second to take the photo or photos, and if you are focused on the lines then you will not see the main part of the photo which is the main content.
    Content is basically what is happening in the frame of your camera, what you decided to point your camera at.

To be Continued………..

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