Mastering Visual Design: It’s More Than Just Lines and Curves

Robert Rodriguez Jr / Issue No. 60 / Oct 7th, 2024

Hello Reader,

Visual design and composition are topics I never stop learning about or sharing with others, but I’ll be honest—it can feel mechanical and uninspiring. Telling students they now have to go into the field and start looking for lines, curves, specific shapes, color combinations, and all the rest does seem like a sure way to kill the excitement of photographing a beautiful sunrise, wouldn’t you agree?

But here’s the thing: careful use of these elements is critical to creating a successful photograph. It’s the visual grammar that lets you tell a story.

It reminds me of my college years as a music student playing scales over and over again. It didn’t feel like real music, and it certainly didn’t feel inspiring. But it was the process of internalizing the scales that lead to hearing the notes and their relationships in other ways, increasing my musical fluency. And the same process happens in photography.

At first, you consciously look for the building blocks of composition—lines, shapes, patterns, etc. It feels forced and awkward, and you may wonder if it’s even worth it. But with practice, something changes. You stop actively looking for those elements, and you start seeing them naturally. They become part of how you view the world and how you frame your images.

That’s when the magic happens. You start to notice lines and shapes everywhere, and suddenly you have this new way of composing your images. It’s like a new visual language you’ve learned, and the more you practice it, the more fluent you become.

Yes it takes time and patience, but it is not beyond anyone who makes the effort to learn and practice regularly.

A great exercise is to find a simple subject—a tree, for example—and photograph it in as many ways as you can. Try to use all the possible leading lines, diagonals, patterns, shape combinations, and focal lengths you can—the point is to keep exploring even after you think you’ve tried it all.

You’ll find that if you do this often enough, what you learn can be applied to any scene or subject. This is the essence of composition: guiding the viewer through an image in a way that feels natural and harmonious.

When I’m out in the field, I don’t start by thinking about composition. I look for something that inspires me—light, a special moment, or a scene that makes me stop and take notice. It’s only after that spark of inspiration that I begin thinking about how to frame it using the tools of composition. Light comes first, inspiration comes first, and composition follows as a way to capture that feeling in the limited frame of the camera.

The challenge is always the same: how do I frame what I see in a way that conveys how I feel? And the answer is almost always to simplify. Include only what matters in the frame, because clutter and ambiguity will weaken the image. The art of composition is in finding that balance between the individual elements and a unified whole—where everything in the frame works together to evoke a feeling or tell a story.

What makes this so personal is that each of us sees the world differently. As photographers, we have to be bold in expressing what moves us, without worrying too much about what others think. That’s how we get closer to creating something authentic—something based on our unique vision.

At the end of the day, what matters most is the viewer’s experience. They don’t care about our technique, our gear, or how long we spent in front of editing software. After exhibiting my work at over 50 art fairs and galleries, I’ve learned that viewers only care about one thing: does the image make them feel something?

It’s not about how we express something, but what we express. When you understand that, you can create images that speak to anyone, photographer or not. That’s the power of composition.

Inspiration

Lightroom Denoise

Are you regularly using Lightroom's Denoise feature? If not, you’re missing out on a great way to remove noise automatically without having to use a third-party plugin and generating a non-raw file. Lightroom does create a new DNG file for you, but if you’re happy with the results, you can simply delete the original file.

Here’s an example before and after of a very noisy image I made years ago…

You can see in the closeup how much cleaner it is without losing any detail or texture.

You can access Denoise in the Detail panel of the Develop Module, OR by right-clicking (Ctrl-click) any image in the Library module and selecting “Enhance.”

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Check the box for Denoise and leave the Amount set to the default of 50. I find that works best for most images.

​Join the conversation about Denoise over at the Creative Path Community Forum

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Questions, comments, feedback? Please reply and share your thoughts, I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading!

Robert :)

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