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However, doing so will make you consider each element in your scene more carefully, leading to much stronger compositions. Read on for 18 brilliant examples of negative space for inspiration and scroll down further for five top tips on how to use negative space in your own work courtesy of artist Timothy Von Rueden. We're so used to focusing on the main subject in a scene that it can seem strange to treat it almost as an afterthought. Mastering the use of negative space takes time. This is a great way to learn how to use negative space, and it's amazing how a small change in composition can make a big difference to the effectiveness of a photo.Įxperiment with different compositions to see how they affect the feel of the photo. Something I love to do from time to time is go through my old pictures in Photoshop or Lightroom, experimenting with different crops to see how they affect the overall feel of the shot. Be generous with the amount of empty space you leave, and don't feel you have to cram something interesting into every square inch of the frame. When framing your photo, adjust your composition until the positive and negative spaces in the shot feel well balanced against one another. This forces you to pay more attention to your composition, and helps you see shapes and sizes more accurately.įocus on the spaces between objects to balance them more effectively. The key to overcoming these problems is to ignore the objects in the scene altogether and instead concentrate on the gaps between and around them. Unfortunately these preconceptions distort the way we view a scene, and this can lead to photos which look good in our mind but not so good in reality.
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Our brains are full of preconceived ideas about the way objects look, in terms of their size, shape, colour, texture, and so on. How to Use Negative Space in Your Photography Getting this balance right is tricky and rather subjective, but it's something you'll get better at with time and practice.
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When used properly, negative space provides a natural balance against the positive space in a scene. This creates interesting spaces between objects, and the. Negative space provides breathing room and draws your eye to the main subject. One way to bring negative space into your photos is to shoot from very low or very high vantage points.
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All of this adds up to a more engaging composition. It provides "breathing room", giving your eyes somewhere to rest and preventing your image from appearing too cluttered with "stuff". Negative space defines and emphasises the main subject of a photo, drawing your eye to it. The sky in this photo forms the negative space around the main subject. This definition is rather abstract, so take the following example the power lines in this image form the positive space while the sky is the negative space.
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Put simply, negative space is the area which surrounds the main subject in your photo (the main subject is known as the "positive space"). Unfortunately it's something that's understood by relatively few people, but with a little bit of practice it can help you look at your photos in a new way, transforming your compositions and producing truly breathtaking results. It's equally useful in photography, and can be used to turn an average photo into an outstanding one. This is when we went too far and needed to remove some elements and introduce some empty space.Negative space, sometimes referred to as white space, is a concept that's been used in art, design, architecture, and sculpture for hundreds of years. It can make our eyes wander and never stop on a specific element in the frame. When we create images with lots of elements, we can easily create a very distracting scene, and it’s hard to know where the main subject is. Finding the right balance is achieved by proper composition, which I teach in detail in Food To Frame. When it comes to busier scenes, or whenever you add additional elements to the frame, you must also look at the space between the elements and how negative space creates a connection or separation between them. In the left photo – a minimal scene – deciding where to place negative space is just a matter of left, right, up, and down. Let’s look at these two photos and see where I’ve placed the subjects in relation to negative space. You might be thinking: Negative space only works in minimal scenes, with only a main subject and all that negative space.
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