Best Emphasis Photography Tips - Photography Art Museum

Emphasis Photography

Emphasis Photography is focusing attention on the main subject. There are many different ways to produce emphasis. The where and how you place your subject within the four walls of the photo’s frame will focus attention on the subject. The way you relate other objects in the photo to it, by the way you focus on it, by the way light falls on it, and other simple techniques will help you create emphasis.

The first, and most important, decision is where to place the main subject. The traditional rule of composition is to divide the photo’s frame into three equal vertical parts. Place your subject on approximately one of the dividing lines. The photo on the right shows this technique. However, this does not mean the rule can never be broken. Just remember where you place your subject in your photo helps determine what you are saying about the subject.

An obvious way to show emphasis of your subject is to make it larger than the other objects around it. When you take the photo get in close, dominate the frame with your subject’s image unless you have a good reason not to.

My favorite technique to emphasis the subject is framing. Especially if your subject is small or far away you can position other items in the photo to frame around the subject to make it stand out. Bushes, trees, branches, fences, shadows, almost anything can be used to frame your subject As long as it does not distract from the subject. You want the viewer’s eye to go to your subject not what you use to frame it.

Framing is commonly used to improve many landscape and nature photos. Using a tree on one side and a canopy of branches on top of a landscape vista adds depth to the photo's composition and directs the eye to the subject of the photo. A fence at the bottom of a landscape will add a near and far dimension which helps the viewer see distance in the photo also adding to the composition.

You can also use depth of field and focus to frame. By keeping the subject in sharp focus and using a larger aperture you narrow the depth of field. This will blur objects around the subject creating a frame, again drawing the viewer’s eye to your subject.

Other ways you can create emphasis is through selective lighting, converging lines, selective focus, repetition, and motion. I won’t go into all of these, but if you are interested there are many books and other sources of information on emphasis.

My goal is to get you curious about the many tools and techniques that can be used to compose a better photograph, Next time you shoot more photos of nature try one or more of these techniques to use emphasis.

Emphasis Photography