Umbrian Meadow

I’m continually astonished at how small things can have a big impact. Take the humble comma for instance*. The placement of this relatively insignificant little mark can make all the difference to how legible a sentence is. Not adding a comma into the relevant place in a sentence will produce a stream of words that never seem to stop and can cause much anxiety in the reader of said sentence as they wonder how long they have to keep reading before they can draw breath and actually take in just what the sentence is actually trying to say. Too many commas, and, the, sentence, becomes, choppy, and, too, staccato, by half.

Photographic composition is a lot like writing, in that small things like commas can make a big difference to how successful, or not, a piece of work is. As I mentioned in a previous article, a classic example of a small thing in the wrong place, is placing Aunt Matilda in a photo so that it looks as though a tree is growing out of her head. This sort of thing is so easily done; in the same way that it’s easy to forget to apply correct punctuation to a sentence.

So what to do? In the case of a sentence, once it has been committed to screen or paper, the first thing to do is to read it through. Does it make sense? Is a comma needed to make the words flow naturally? What would the sentence sound like if read aloud? With a photograph it is useful to have a similar mental checklist before pressing the shutter button. Have I looked all around the viewfinder and not just at the subject of the photograph? Are there elements in the picture that shouldn’t be there, and if so will they disappear or be less distracting if I move position slightly? Does Aunt Matilda really have a tree growing out of her head? What can done about it if she does? This obviously all takes time and a certain amount of discipline, but after a while the process becomes second nature. And you will be astonished just how much difference it will make to the final image. Much in the same way that another punctuation mark, the full stop or period, makes a satisfying conclusion to a well crafted. sentence

* The punctuation mark, that is, not the butterfly; though if the butterfly effect theory is correct, perhaps the comma is the pesky insect that’s been causing all these storms across the world recently.