One Step to Simplify Photo Composition

Hey everybody. Professional Outdoor Photographer, David Johnston here, for Outdoor Photography Guide. One of the biggest questions that a lot of new photographers have and even those photographers who are going to a new place for the first time having this question too is why can't my images here look like that person? Maybe your favorite photographer has been to that location and you're trying to simulate what they saw in your own images. One of the fastest ways that you can get better photographs is actually simplifying your composition. Figuring out what your subject is in a scene and featuring it prominently. I want to take you through this example that I had in Grand Teton National Park. I spent a week out there, trying to get a dream photograph of the Teton Mountain Ranch. And what I found was simplifying the composition, got me exactly what I wanted to get. So take this photograph. You have this big foreground in the fence, that's going through the scene. You have the valley and fog and then you have the mountains in the background. Cool shot. Yes, but it's a little bit cluttered and what's actually the subject here. It's the mountains. It's what you prominently want to feature. So I reframed it, trying to exclude anything that took away from the subject and include more of the subject. So only the valley here, the trees going across the mid ground and the mountains in the background still simplified but not simplified enough, that subject still gets a little bit lost. So the last image I took is just of the mountain face covered in peeking out from behind the fog. And you do get, hey, here's the subject. It's obvious. It's the mountains, prominently featured in the entire frame, filling it up. I think what a lot of photographers do is get to that location take the first shot, accept it and move on. But when you continue to whittle down what the subject matter is in the frame, then you get that more thoughtful, simplified shot. That's oftentimes, your best one of the day. You can keep all of them, but the best one is typically the one where the subject shines. I'm doing the exact same thing out here and a local forest with a small scene, kind of a macro photography scene. I initially photograph this root system covered in Moss behind me with a very wide look to it. And it was cool. It reminded me of kind of like a glacial field in Iceland, running through the valley. But the subject matter is something that I didn't know what it was when I first shot this image. Now whittling it down, there were a couple small features here of highlighted tones and shadowed tones with some mushrooms growing around in the area, too. When I simplified the shot, those became more prominent. Simplifying it even more, got me this scene that kind of plays on a mountain side with trees, poking out with the mushrooms, being the trees. So a simplified shot is oftentimes the one that I like best that shines the most. And that is easy for people to see and say, hey, okay here's the subject matter in the frame. Just remember every time you're going out to shoot, photograph the first scene, figure out what the subject matter is. Figure out what's taking away from the subject matter. Reframe it to highlight the subject better and whittle that down over and over. More often than not, you're going to be left with your favorite shot. Having the subject prominently featured with barely anything else in the frame at all.