How can you plan your visual concept on Instagram and what applications can help you with it? What are the good photo compositions and color harmony? Should I still white & bright my pictures as influencers do, darken them or natural editing working the best? I will try to cover all this and a bit more in my next articles written about the visual concepts and what is working the best in 2021 on Instagram.

Probably the most important and basic thing to remember when you are taking a picture – photo composition. It is the location of the object(s) in respect to each other or/and the environment. There are probably more than 20 existing compositions and some of them are very specific and not applicable to everyday photo shooting routine, so on this level, I will give you a short overview and examples of the most useful and most common:

Rule of Thirds

The most common and easy-to-use composition method – rule of thirds.

« Does every successful photo follow the rule of thirds? Definitely not. But every skill or art is built on certain foundations, and understanding and mastering them are important for improving your abilities. Repetition is king when it comes to honing foundational skills. Practice leads to muscle memory and building trust in your eye, which eventually becomes an instinct for what works and what doesn’t in photography »

You have probably noticed those lines appearing automatically once you are cropping your picture on your phone or computer. You can also turn this on and have them while you take pictures (very useful at the beginning and make the editing time shorter). To make this happen on your iPhone or Ipad go to Settings, Camera, and tap the switch next to Grid (it will work both on front and back cameras).

There are certainly cases when the rule of thirds can be broken (like you can see in the pictures below). There were different methods used, such as filling the frame on the first, or “pulling back from the subject” if the subject is a small part of the photo, the best way to highlight them is to put them in the exact center of the image).

Leading Lines

Leading lines is a photo composition in which lines in the pictures “leading” our vision to the main object(s). As you can see in the picture below where our eyes can travel the stairs up and finding the model. In general, this composition can be easily used when you can locate your model at the corridor, stairs, bridge, street (sidewalk), or with light effects (as shown in the picture with a child).

(erickimphotography.com; didnegar.com)

And in the other photo from Matrix (below), we can also observe how our eyes traveling with the bullets to the main character (where bullets are the leading lines).

Frame Within the Frame

Another interesting and creative composition that catching out eyes – frame within the frame. As a photo itself is the frame already we can see additional environment frames within (like a mirror in the first picture or windows on the second). In the last two pictures we can also observe that when the environment does not offer any additional frames, hands can be used to make one and bring closer attention to the face of the character.

(maini.live; thewatchtower.com)

Triangles and Golden Triangles

The rule here is – if your photo has any kinds of triangles in it, our eyes unconsciously getting caught on it. It is just something about triangles, unknown mystery 🙂 The golden triangles we can see very often in architectural photos but they also can appear in pictures completely not related to it (as you can see in the last two pictures).

(expertphotography.com)

And another example of a triangle on the photo we can see from the Breaking Bad image, where the people standing at different distances and making this perfect shape in the picture.

I hope you found this short overview useful and you feel a bit more inspired now to try this out! I will continue writing about visual concept in my next article and will discuss colors, editing and how to plan your IG grid. I really appreciate your feedback and ideas which I can mention next time!