Composition & Photography

Own composition, use composition, and make composition your own in your photographs!

In Composition & Photography, photographer and bestselling author Harold Davis teaches you how to perceive patterns and abstractions and incorporate them into your image-making process. If one of the goals of photography is to show viewers things that are new, or things they haven't seen before, or things they have seen many times but need to see anew, then it's with the thoughtful and considered use of composition that you do that.

In this book, you'll learn how to reduce your subject matter to the fundamentals, and to show familiar subjects in unfamiliar, novel ways. Harold covers topics and themes such as:

Lines and circles

Rectangles

Combinations

Repetition

Symmetry and asymmetry

Abstraction

Entering and exiting

Vanishing points and perspective

Emphasis

Designing within a frame

Creating order from chaos

Composition & Photography will help you find the tools and visual vocabulary to creatively design your photographs. Regardless of the genre and kind of photography you practice, you'll learn to create powerful compositions that incorporate structure and form into your work in ways that best support your images. Along the way, Harold shows and discusses his own work relating to each compositional element or theme he's exploring. Featured throughout the book are exercises about flexibility and process, designed to spur your creativity and help you begin an internal creative discussion.

"My goal as a photography teacher and writer about photography is to inspire and to help you become the best and most creative photographer and image-maker that you can be."
— Harold Davis

"Harold Davis is a force of nature—a man of astonishing eclectic skills and accomplishments."
— Rangefinder Magazine