"There's a lot that could be tucked into this little concept, but, for our purposes, we're going to think about balance in terms of an image's distribution of its visual weight. Very broadly speaking, when I look at a shot, I tend to imagine the individual parts of the overall composition as having a corresponding weight. If there's something in the foreground, it has more weight than something in the background. A larger object will have more weight than a smaller object.
In most scenarios, the more space something takes up in the frame, the more weight it has attached to it. The goal, then, is twofold. Either we want to take a shot that distributes the weight evenly across the entire photo or we can choose to have equal parts of weight and absence. The absence of something in a frame, or the area without a subject, is what I referred to earlier as "negative space." For instance, here's a photo that is not equally distributed and heavily weighted on one side [see above].
If we were to cut this image diagonally, we could see that the cat is taking up almost a perfect half of the bottom right. We have a nearly equal amount of negative and positive space. I don't often go for shots like this, but they can be compelling because of their distinctive composition.
What I usually aim for is to have a much more equal distribution of elements within the photo, with a similar amount of positive and negative space. Ideally, I do my best to get the cat's main features in the centre of the frame and their bodies and subsequent negative space around them take up the rest in equal proportions. Since we're starting out as burgeoning cat photographers, I recommend keeping your subject, or whatever feature or object you're emphasising, in the centre of the frame as much as possible.
On most devices, there's a little coloured box in the middle of the screen. This is the area where your equipment will focus by default, assuming that you haven't changed something in your focus settings. This might seem like too much handholding, but we're going to walk through how to properly compose a scene step-by-step.
- Pull out your device. While holding it and looking into the viewfinder or screen, guide the device's focus box to where the ca is, and aim at their face.
- With their face still being the centre point, move toward or away from them until the rest of their body fills the frame.
- Now, centre their entire body in the grid of your viewfinder or screen. Do your best to keep an equal distance from their bodies and the negative space or surroundings on all sides.
- When you think there is roughly equal space on all four sides of them (up, down, left, right), snap the photo.
You should get something like this:"
Image Source: Andrew Marttila