Negative Space

 Negative Space

Negative space is the area between and around objects in a photo. Use it to see shapes and sizes more effectively, and produce better composed images.

 

One way of making sure your composition is strong is to pay attention to the positive and negative spaces.

The primary subject of your photo, a person, building, toy car, whatever, is the "positive space."

Negative space is everything else. Something you see in a lot of photography is things sticking out of heads, wires across the scene you didn't see when taking the picture, and so on. This is just from paying so much attention to the subject that photographers forget what is in the background or surrounding the subject.

Exercise: take pictures of three different subjects outside. Doesn't matter what they are, a person, a car, a building. While taking the picture, don't worry about the subject, just pay attention to what is around and behind the subject.

Use the background to compose the shot - for this exercise, the actual subject is not important. If the background is not working for you, move around until it is - zoom in or zoom out to change perspective, get low, or go higher. Whatever makes the background a pleasing photo.

How to Use Negative Space in Your Photography

Our brains are full of preconceived ideas about the way objects look, in terms of their size, shape, color, texture, and so on. Unfortunately these preconceptions distort the way we view a scene, and this can lead to photos which look good in our mind but not so good in reality.

The key to overcoming these problems is to ignore the objects in the scene altogether and instead concentrate on the gaps between and around them. This forces you to pay more attention to your composition, and helps you see shapes and sizes more accurately.

 

When framing your photo, adjust your composition until the positive and negative spaces in the shot feel well balanced against one another. Be generous with the amount of empty space you leave, and don't feel you have to cram something interesting into every square inch of the frame.

Something I love to do from time to time is go through my old pictures in Photoshop or Lightroom, experimenting with different crops to see how they affect the overall feel of the shot. This is a great way to learn how to use negative space, and it's amazing how a small change in composition can make a big difference to the effectiveness of a photo.

Mastering the use of negative space takes time. We're so used to focusing on the main subject in a scene that it can seem strange to treat it almost as an afterthought. However, doing so will make you consider each element in your scene more carefully, leading to much stronger compositions.