MINIMALISM OR A WAY OF IMPROVING YOUR COMPOSITION SKILLS

Is it possible to use minimalism as an artistic trend to improve our photographic composition technique? To give an answer to this question, let's start at the beginning.

What is minimalism?

Minimalism goes beyond the artistic, it is a complete philosophy. Roughly speaking, it consists of applying the famous phrase "less is more" in every field you can imagine. On a creative level, we could define it as a trend that tries to reduce to a minimum the compositional and expressive elements without sacrificing the clarity, coherence and cohesion of the message to be transmitted.

In the field of photography, when we talk about minimalism, very clean images come to mind, with a single subject and an extreme coherence of the few elements that exist in the photograph. For me personally, a clean, pleasing to the eye and above all tidy image comes to mind. Each of the elements in this type of image is there for a well thought out reason and one of them would not make sense without the other.

This sounds very technical but... What do you mean by this, Mara?

Let's make it simple with an example: this photo I took in the Algarve with a drone of a surfer waiting to catch the last wave of the day is sustained and conveys its full message with as few elements as possible and, if one of them were left out of the composition, the photograph would limp and we wouldn't get the message across in its entirety.

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From left to right: Original picture - Altered picture deleting the sea at the top of the image - Altered image deleting the surfer and shadow.

The photograph has the right and necessary elements to make complete sense for the message I wanted to transmit: “The last wave at sunset”.

Do you understand where I'm going? ;)

Now comes the fun part, how we can improve our landscape photography using minimalist techniques without falling into pure minimalism by hand.

ISOLATE YOUR SUBJECT
In any photograph, the more elements we want to include, the more complicated the composition will be so that all the subjects have the exact importance in the shot and in landscape this can be a problem since nature has millions of things to offer us in the same place.
Applying the premise of less is more, we will look for a subject that will be the "protagonist" of our photograph and we will try to isolate it to focus all the attention on it.

NEGATIVE SPACE
Always try to compensate the image with negative space. Negative space is a powerful tool of minimalism that allows us to achieve very clean images. You can use it the way you prefer: completely isolating the subject and leaving the rest of the image as negative space or using this negative space to compensate the areas covered with the subject of the photograph. The most important thing here is to compensate the whole image.
For example:

In these both cases the water & sky are the negative space which compensate the images.

FIND PATTERNS & TEXTURES
This is something I was forced to learn when I started in aerial photography, since one of the most striking things to see from a drone view are the patterns and textures that the landscape offers us. From that moment on I started to focus more on the textures with camera in hand and with a human view. Isolating textures allows us to create images with repetitive patterns that are very pleasing to our eyes. Trees in a forest, textures of rocks in the mountains, waves in the sea, corn fields... there are thousands of textures out there waiting for us and that will help us to get clean images with minimalist tendencies.

The pattern of the waves arriving to the cost and its textures shot on drone.

Patterns and textures of some mountains. Shot on camera.

TAKE CARE OF COLOR
The great forgotten. Achieving a good combination of colors is as important as achieving a good composition in photography. Color will help us to make our shot visually pleasing and will allow us to better convey the message. Not all colors match each other, not all color intensities are equally pleasing to the eye. The use we make of it will determine in many cases whether the message is cohesive or not. And as proof of this, let's take the first photograph in this article, perfectly compensated compositionally, and let's alter the colors to see what happens...

Left: Definitive picture balancing tones, saturation and intensity / Right: Image edited not having into consideration the chromatic circle, intensity and saturation

We have just created an incongruity in the original message I wanted to convey of calm at sunset, only by modifying the color and its intensity.

USE GUIDING LINES
One of the compositional rules par excellence is the use of guide lines to get to our subject and we are lucky enough that they are present in any landscape, let's use them! Remember that main subject we want to isolate? Make the view lead us to it by including some guide lines extracted from the landscape. For this you can use mountain ranges, seashores, cliffs, roads, sequences of trees or mountain huts...etc. Any additional element that guides the eye to our isolated subject is valid!

Using natural elements to guide the eye to our isolated subject.

And, last but not least, remember that photography is light and not only serves us to expose the scene correctly or give a warm touch but the light casts shadows, creates reflections in the water and the use we make of it is decisive in getting a better image.

Now that you have some of the guidelines to take your photography to another level, do you dare to put them into practice?