Photography Ideas For Innovative Photography Projects — Negative Space

August 10, 2010

Creating a photography project is an excellent way to practice photography. As long as you are going to be spending your time on a photo project, why not choose a project that grows your photography skills. In the following paragraphs, one such skill, negative space, will be discussed.

Negative space is a compositional technique that can be utilized to produce eye-catching photos. Therefore, why don’t we take a look at the technique?

Negative Space and Composition

At a fundamental level, any image can be broken down into three components

Frame: The border that identifies the perimeters of the image.

Positive Space: The positive space is composed of the objects that the image is all about. Put simply, it is the main subject of the photograph.

Negative Space: The space between the positive space and the frame.

Not surprisingly, in the process of composing an image, a lot of photographers think mostly about how they will place the positive space in an image. Essentially, the main interest of these photographers is how the main subject will be placed. The area surrounding the subject, the negative space, ends up being whatever happened to be there at the particular time the photograph was taken. This is a mistake! This is because, if managed correctly, the negative space can do a couple of very important things.

First: The negative space can serve to define the positive space.

Second: The negative space can help make the positive space stand out.

The way in which the negative space helps to define what the positive space is all about is by supplying additional details about the positive space. For example, a close-up of a waterfall might exhibit the elegance of the plummeting water, but it may not exhibit any hint of the environment in which the waterfall exists. To be able to better define the positive space, additional detail is necessary. If the photographer were to show some of the landscape around the positive space, this would create some negative space that would certainly help to better define the positive space.

While using a negative space can really improve an image, there is one thing that must be avoided. The negative space should never be permitted to overpower the positive space as this would certainly serve to deteriorate the image. For this example, the photographer might make the negative space a bit out of focus so that it becomes subservient to the positive space.

The essential issue here is that the negative space has to support, not compete with, the positive space. Otherwise, the negative space will not likely enhance the image.

Making the positive space stick out is the other way that the negative space helps to enhance photos. The negative space does this by helping to control the attention of a person that is viewing an image. It does this by focusing the attention of a viewer. Specifically, it focuses the attention on the positive space. To make the negative space more effective at focusing the attention, all unproductive detail must be eliminated from the negative space.

So the moral of the story is that each of these two spaces needs to be thoroughly evaluated when an image is composed. Basically, photographers need to pay just as much attention to the negative space as they do the positive space.

Your Photography Project

So, why not set up a photography project around this idea. For this project, you should focus on capturing images that have very carefully thought out negative spaces.

Synopsis

This post presented just one idea for a photography project. However, much more can be learned.

If you would like to look at several other great ideas, just click Impressive Photography Ideas.

categories: digital photography,photography,hobbies