If you are a photographer or cinematographer you must know these 5 elements of design. Line, shape, colour, texture and pattern are all around us in both the man-made and the natural world. In fact, they are part of the fundamental building blocks of life and the laws of physics. On a visual level, they each have the power to evoke an emotive response and, in some instances, provoke a physical reaction. We can almost hear you saying, what are they on about, but it is for this reason that these elements are such important compositional tools. Line, shape, colour, texture and pattern can be used visually in photography, either individually or in combination, to create or enhance mood and emotion within an image and, as in art, they can be very powerful tools.
1. Line
The line is also associated with the horizon and its position in the frame determines the portion of the frame that receives the greatest emphasis. For example, when the horizon line is positioned across the middle of the frame, equal weight is given to both halves of the picture. This equality forms a natural balance that creates a feeling of serenity and stasis. In photography, this can be used to create a peaceful mood or misused to make an image look lifeless. Positioning the horizon higher or lower creates either a dominant foreground or dominant background. A high horizon gives emphasis to the foreground – our eye travels into the frame and through this foreground to the horizon, creating a greater sense of depth. In contrast, a low horizon minimizes the foreground’s importance within the frame whilst accentuating everything above it. With landscape images, these would be ‘ big sky ’ shots.
2. Shape
Where lines meet they start to create shapes and it’s fascinating how we as humans quickly identify shapes within a scene. Again, shapes are apparent and abundant throughout nature and evoke emotional responses in us. Triangles and polygons create a sense of strength and stability – a form of permanence. Pyramids, for example, are solid, immovable objects until you invert them. Then their component triangles lose their stability and become unbalanced as they stand precariously on a point. When viewed together in the same frame, any conflict between balance and imbalance creates a tension that heightens visual energy. In contrast, circles, spheres and similar shapes, rather than creating direction contain the visual energy within their shape and draw attention to themselves.
They can be very powerful if forming all or part of the main subject of an image but, when they aren’t the main subject, they must be used carefully so that they don’t dominate the frame or conflict with this subject for the viewer’s attention. Two competing shapes can create a dynamic composition but they can also easily cause an image to lose impact by competing with each other.
3. Color
The third element, colour, is immensely powerful and can easily dominate an image. The colour of an object as we see it is determined by the wavelengths of light that its surface reflects or absorbs. Colours themselves create moods and are widely used in areas such as architecture to do just that. Colours tend to fall into either warm or cool tones. Blue is a cool colour. It evokes tranquillity and serenity. In contrast colours such as yellow and orange are warm, creating feelings of joy and happiness, whilst our response to colours like red is alarm, anxiety and a feeling of imminent danger. It’s not just humans who respond in this way to colour. The same principles apply throughout the animal kingdom and the broader natural world as a means of attracting mates or symbiotic partners whilst warding off predators and competitors.
Combining colours can be used subtly to modify mood and also to create dimension and form. One of the most important colour relationships, though, is that between complementary colours – red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple, for example. Combined in a photograph, these colour pairings inject vitality and zeal to lift the composition. Red objects set against a green background will appear more vivid, while the different wavelengths of red and green light cause our eyes to respond with physical movement, adjusting focus, creating visual energy. The study of colour and our responses to it could be a chapter in its own right. Suffice it to say that for photographers, it’s essential to have an understanding of how different colours make us feel and react so that we can use this in our compositions.
Ignore it and you could easily make mistakes when deciding how to frame a shot that, at the time, seem unimportant but later, when viewing an image, are glaringly obvious and change our response to that image, sometimes dramatically. When shooting in black and white it’s also important to understand how different colours reproduce as tones. With this understanding, you can compose to make contrasts and shapes, as darker or lighter tones, from the colours themselves even in the absence of colour.
4. Texture
In photography, the texture is created by the way in which light falls on the different shapes and colours of surfaces. Even in the same material, a rough surface and a smooth surface placed next to each other will create an appearance of texture that can introduce a three-dimensional feel.
5. Pattern
The pattern is created by reoccurring shapes, colours or textures. Graphically they can be very powerful and also deceptive, again creating the appearance of three dimensions in a two-dimensional subject. Texture and pattern really come into their own in close-up and abstract photography, and it is here that the most commonly become the subject of the image. However, this is not exclusively their most powerful use and many strong images use either or both, together or in contrast, to add striking visual elements to a composition.
With these five elements of design, the photographer can create dimension, depth, emotion, mood, form and contrasts. They can become the image themselves or, used individually or in combination, be used to add interest or emphasize the primary subject of an image. These are the elements that define an image and ultimately determine our response to it.
