Photo Book Layout: Showing Off Composition
Composition is a vital skill for all photographers. When you shoot a family portrait, you know that you want to create balance and maintain proportions. When you shoot travel scenes and landmarks, your photos don’t have that snapshot quality – you compose your shot so that it contains more than just the subject, you ensure that surrounding areas are included, or capture it in a way that hasn’t already been done a thousand times. When you capture shots of the bride and groom, you know that there’s a huge difference between a shot that is composed to be up close and personal and a shot that’s taken from a distance.
Composition is something that you work on – and something that you read about and study. You’ve taken the time to really learn about the rule of thirds (you probably are at a point where you don’t even have to think about it anymore). This same principle is something that you should keep in mind when you’re laying out a photo book whether you’re creating something for publication, for a client, or even for marketing your work.
Yes, when you consider photo book layout you’ll want to ensure that you’re paying attention to margins and bleeds, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot apply the same sense of composition when you design your photo book. Family portraits should be added to the page in a way that shows just how dynamic the composition is. Photography that captures landscapes and scenes can be placed within the book so that each page really draws in the person who is looking at it (even when your photo books contain text or prices and descriptions, you want to be sure that it’s the photo that is the center of attention).
The same is true when you take wedding photos, when you capture fashion, interiors or anything else: when you layout your photo book, you want to be sure that viewers are drawn to the subject of the photo. Composition is key.
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