Self-Critique: Frost Bank Composition Study

There’s something interesting about photo walks. I’ll take the camera out and wander a location aimlessly for a while, and sometimes, I might even take some photos. Ninety-percent of the time, I get home with a memory card full of snapshots that I will never look at. In fact, most of them are forgotten until much later when I start wondering why my card is full. But there’s a reason for that; a lot of times my photo walks usually don’t produce anything more than snapshots of things I felt were interesting (at the time). And they’re just that— snapshots. Rarely do they have any thought put into them, and it shows.

But sometimes, every great once in a while, I’ll see a composition and act on it. In this case, it’s a shot of a pretty popular building here in town: the Frost Bank building.

Now, there’s a reason this building is gaining in popularity, especially with photographers. It’s a very modern looking building in a city full not modern architecture. It wasn’t by accident either, the architects fought tooth and nail to get the design approved, as this particular city has a lot of regulations that are keeping it from living in the 21st century.

But I digress. It’s not only a modern building, but it’s a pretty damn attractive one at that. The all-glass structure stands tall in a part of downtown where there aren’t a ton of tall buildings, and that allows it to catch any delicious light that might be in the sky. I got lucky this evening and the sky was popping off like it hadn’t done in ages, and the building was soaking it up like a sponge.

I wandered to a part of town that has some unique features… away from the hustle and bustle of the main drag. And that’s when I saw this composition:

I rarely take photos like this, because— why? I don’t work for Frost Bank. I’m not part of a marketing team. They certainly aren’t paying me to take a photo of their building (although hey, Frost, if you’re reading this: call me). And it’s probably not going to find its way into my portfolio— it’s more of an editorial style shot, something that would be used for advertising or slapping on the back of a brochure or something. Make no mistake, if that was my assignment and a paid gig, I’d be elated.

But alas, for now it’s nothing more than a teaching tool.

The reason why I dig this photo so much is that everything in this scene is very deliberately placed. I took several different shots, feeling out the image, moving about from one step to the left, to one step to the right, to slightly zoomed in, then zoomed back out again. I wanted everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) to work together here.

One of the first things you may notice is that, much like ogres, this photo has layers. Several in fact. There is a foreground, middleground, and background. Many different elements practically stacked on top of each other. With so much going on in the scene, it would be very easy for one thing to overpower another, or for objects to overlap in unflattering ways. And believe me, they did. Hence the several shots and moving about that I mentioned above. The difference between a shot that worked and one that didn’t was a matter of inches.

So let’s break it down in to basic composition. There are a few at play here; it’s why (in my opinion) the piece works so well. First we’ll talk about the rule of thirds, as it’s the one with which most people are familiar. In this regard, it’s fairly simple. The Frost building, while it could be argued isn’t the main focal point of the image, is still a key focal point, and it’s situated in the top- and left-third of the image. The light pole and water feature balance it out in the right-third. Pretty standard stuff, and honestly, it’s usually the go-to composition for any large tower because— really, what the hell else are you gonna do?

Luckily here I had other things to work with. It brings us to the next compositional technique: the use of diagonals. Honestly, I don’t use diagonals much because it’s really easy to screw it up. The last thing you want is for a diagonal to lead your viewer out of the frame. But there are a lot of diagonals going on here. Obviously, the most recognizeable is the railing that’s cutting across the bottom half of the scene, and the bridge. Now while you could argue that the diagonal railing at the bottom is leading the eye out of the image, you’ll notice that the intersection of the railing and the bottom of the bridge connects just before the edge of the frame. Thus, it connects to the diagonal that leads back toward the center of the image. Both the diagonal from the car garage on the upper left and the diagonal from wall on the right (though not quite as obvious) both point toward the center of the image.

The third form of composition (yes, there’s a third) is the “triangle” composition. Usually, a triangle composition is formed by three objects in the scene that combine for an overall appealing image. And while there are not three specific objects here, in this case it’s more of three different areas that catch the eye; the three brightest parts of the scene. Here that would be the area of the water feature / light post, the colorful building with the bright yellow streak of light, and the logo at the top of the Frost building. If you were to draw a line connecting these areas, you’d get your triangle. The way you can tell that this composition works is if you were to crop off the bottom part of the image, where the railing meets the bottom of the bridge, you would still have a solid composition, thanks to this triangle. At first,when taking the image, I played with the idea of excluding that entire railing at the bottom of the frame, but doing so meant sacrificing information on the sides of the scene as well. A post-processed crop to an 8x10 would be much more effective if I wanted to eliminate that section of the scene. Which I don’t, because I like it.

Examples of the three different compositions at play. On the left, the diagonals lead the viewer’s eye into the frame. In the center, the features fall roughly in the right and left thirds of the frame. On the right, the three most eye-catching features of the frame form a triangle. Included is an imaginary to crop to show that, due to this triangle, the composition would still work, even without the bottom section of the photo. Alas, the golden spiral does not apply here.

So why keep the railing toward the bottom, when it’s not really necessary to maintain a good, working composition? Well, honestly, I like what it adds to the image. There is so much going on from the middle of the frame upward, this fall-off into darkness works really well to contrast the bright colors and busy nature of the upper half of the scene. I love how the brightly-lit water literally falls into the darkness. The reflections on the water give just enough detail to let us know that yeah, there’s more water down there, while not giving us so much that it detracts from the true focus of the image. At the same time, that railing that cuts across works to dissect that dark area so that it’s not just a big patch of darkness.

Remember when I said above that everything was deliberately placed? No? Well read it again. Just kidding. But, just like a composition is important to an image, so is attention to detail. The reason I moved around so much wasn’t just to make sure the composition in the frame worked, but also that objects in the scene didn’t clash with each other, or get chopped off. If you can see it in the image, you might notice that the lamp post on the right is nestled comfortably in between the branches of the tree. The street light on the far left is completely in the frame, not being chopped off halfway. The bright strip of yellow light underneat the painted building is complete; it doesn’t get chopped off by the railing of the bridge. All of these things have their own room to breathe. We don’t always have that luxury. Sometimes things are going to clash, and it is what it is. But its worth paying attention to, because if you can manage to arrange things in a scene so that they don’t conflict with each other, it’s always going to make for a more pleasing image.

Now that I’ve focused on all of the things I did on purpose, now I get to talk about the stuff I really had no control over, and thus get to admit that expertise will get you a long way, but sometimes it helps to have a little bit of luck.

What do I mean? Well, as much as I like this composition, had I not taken this photo at this exact time of the evening, this whole post would be for naught, as you’d be staring at pretty boring image asking, yourself why I keep going on and on about it. A little bit earlier and it would have been too bright outside, and all of the wonderful light sources that are absolutely glowing in this scene would most likely not be there. The brightness would have forced me to speed up the shutter, which would have frozen the water feature a bit more and we might not have those silky streams smearing down the frame. A little bit later in the evening and it may have been too dark, forcing me to drag the shutter even more, which would have turned a lot of these light sources in to big blobs of light, while also risking the possibility of losing a lot of the detail in the areas that aren’t directly lit.

The sunset was absolutely spectacular that evening, and while the moment had already passed by the time I was taking this shot, there was still a lot of that orange-ish pink light being bounced off of the clouds behind me. That light matters, believe it or not, and it can paint those darker areas with an ambient light is very appealing to the camera. Anyone that has shot at golden hour knows what I mean. I was very fortunate to be at this spot at this time, but I can’t chalk it all up to luck, there were a few candidates that were appealing to my photographic eye at this time, and I chose this one. In fact, as the sun was sinking below the horizon, I made it a point to walk the two and a half blocks to get to this water feature. And the reason I was even downtown with my camera in the first place, was that the sky had been so obscenely epic all day long, I had a pretty strong hunch we were in for some late-evening atmospheric drama. So yeah, it wasn’t a complete accident that I was there, and I’m gonna pat myself on the back for that one.

All that being said, I will admit I was a bit hasty on the editing. I would like to go back and re-work it a bit more carefully. The Frost building, being essentially a giant mirror, is going to be the color of the sky, whatever that color may be at the time. Which was blue. So I had a blue building against a blue sky. I tinted the sky purple just a tad, so that there could be some separation there. I got a bit sloppy with the mask, which is why you can see the original blue sky through the trees on the right. Not a big deal, and definitely fixable.

As it stands though, I’m really happy with the image. I was really glad to be able to dissect it, because honestly, I knew the composition worked when I took the photo. But it wasn’t until I really sat down to look at it, to take it apart piece by piece, did I really understandy why it worked. And I think that’s important. I see a lot of photographers (especially on Youtube) that don’t seem to understand the basics of composition. Or they tell viewers to “break the rules” and then show me that they really don’t have a grasp on the rules they’re “breaking.” But that is a whole other rant that I won’t get into. It’s important to not only look at a photo that doesn’t work and ask yourself why it doesn’t work, it’s equally important to scrutinize the ones you love, and ask yourself why.

If you gained something from reading this, that’s awesome. Hopefully I’ve helped someone out there get a grip on some basic composition techniques. If you feel like this was a waste of your time and you want the last five or ten minutes of your life back, then I’m sorry, but no. You can’t have them back. They’re mine now.