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The Hidden Forces Behind Every Great Photograph

When it comes to a good photograph, composition is invaluable. It is after all the visual language of presenting an idea.
I even have a whole online photography composition course whose sole purpose is to reinforce your skills as a photographer.

But it doesn't end there. Composition matters, of course. It matters a lot.

But composition alone doesn't automatically make a photo good.
How many times a day are you seeing a photo that is pretty to look at, but it moved nothing in you?

I have seen thousands of technically perfect compositions that have left me completely cold.
And I have seen photographs that go against the compositional rules and are great. I couldn't look away.

So today, we will put composition aside. And we are going to talk about some of the other forces at work that help make great photographs. The ones that do not get nearly enough attention.

By the end of this article, you will look at photographs differently.

Let's start.

THE FIRST FORCE: THE MOMENT

The first factor is the moment.

A photograph in its essence is frozen time. It's a fraction of a second, pulled out of an endless stream of moments. The action of photographing is making one of these moments permanent.

Having a perfect composition and no moment is having the perfect car, but no one to drive it.
Or the perfect dish, but no one to taste it.
Or the perfect dress, but no one to wear it.

I can give a thousand analogies, but the core idea is simple. When there is no moment, something is missing.

You can have perfect composition, but if you miss the moment, that's sad. When the moment is missed, no amount of composition can save the photograph.

SOMETIMES THE MOMENT IS PURE LUCK

In 1959, a photographer named Elliott Erwitt was on a commercial assignment in Moscow. He was there photographing kitchen appliances, of all things.

This is how he described it:

"I was working on a commercial assignment on the fair. I was hired by Westinghouse Refrigerators, but I carried my private camera as well. I just happened to be in the right spot at the right time. It's very difficult to work in a crowd, especially a huge crowd. You can't move. But by sheer luck I was able to get into the Macy's kitchen display, behind the fence that separated it from the crowd. I was in the kitchen, free to move, and they just happened to come right up to the fence, so it was like shooting fish in a barrel."

Nixon and Khrushchev happened to walk by. They were mid-argument. The pair happened to have some particularly heated debate near a model of a typical American kitchen, designed to showcase the comforts of the American lifestyle, and so the confrontation gained the name "The Kitchen Debate."

What happened there, that for one second, Nixon jabbed his finger into Khrushchev's chest?
Erwitt was the only photographer in the room.
And he caught it.

That single frame became one of the most reproduced photographs of the Cold War.

Erwitt himself said something I think about a lot:

"The best things happen when you just happen to be somewhere with a camera."

BUT LOOK AT THE CONTACT SHEET

Now, when it comes to moments there is often the idea of the singular, one-time event. But let's look at the contact sheet from that shoot.

Was this a single moment? Not really.
Was this the first shot the photographer took? Not really.

The number under the circled frame is 57, 58. And the whole sequence runs from frame 7 to 76.

So it took the photographer some time to get to that "decisive moment." He was photographing the moment and trying to capture micro gestures. And one of them was that finger-poking one.

Now, eventually the image was taken out of context and was shown to display the tension between the US and Russia. But the contact sheet tells a completely different story from the single iconic frame.

Looking at the surrounding frames, the debate was actually a fluid, semi-friendly argument, primarily about consumer goods, things like cabbage soup vs. red meat, and the domestic lives of citizens. In other frames, Khrushchev is seen making the exact same animated gestures back at Nixon.

Alright, this history of the image got me a bit excited and diverted me from what we were talking about. Haha.

So was this image greatly composed?
Well yeah. The way the figures are distributed, the way the attention goes to the right spot, is done really well.

But you can see on the contact sheet that he worked his way toward that framing. The previous images included the white fence and were taken from a bit of a larger distance, and weren't as good compositionally.

So it happened here that as he was building up his composition, in parallel the moment was building itself, and in one perfect instant, the photographer noticed.
Aesthetics and moment met and created this strong photograph.

Moment does make the photograph far more significant.

You cannot manufacture the moment. Well, you can try, but there will be some unease felt.
What you can do is, first, be ready for it.
And second, once you smell it, work your way toward it, by taking various images and improving your composition with each attempt.

Being ready is mostly about being present, and that is harder than it sounds. I wrote a whole piece about why photographers miss the moment and what to do about it.

I also have a video about how the decisive moment is made, where I go through several of my own contact sheets. You can take a look at it to get a clearer idea.

The question to ask yourself in the field is not just "how do I frame this."
But also: how do I time myself, so I don't miss what's happening in front of me.

THE SECOND FORCE: THE STORY

A photograph can be beautifully composed and still say nothing.

What separates a photograph from a snapshot is that it implies something beyond the frame. And that's context, or story. Basically, it's the "what is this photograph about."



When we work with composition, we can create images without story. Take abstract photography, for example. There's no need for story there. But normally, the story is what gives the photo meaning.

Now let's take that previous photograph of Elliott Erwitt and look at it from that point of view. It has a very strong story. And it had a very strong resonance because of the context, the nature of the relationship between Russia and the US at that time.

The photo mirrors that interaction between the two leaders and applies it to the political relationship between the countries. A small moment out of a larger event.

If you want to go deeper into this, I have a full guide on storytelling in photography.

SOMETIMES THE STORY IS WHAT IS NOT THERE

The story can sometimes not be about what you show.

In photography, you are always tempted to show something that is happening. That's the natural approach. But sometimes showing what is not happening can be even more powerful.

To understand that, let's go to another story.

In August of 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. A young photographer named Josef Koudelka climbed onto a rooftop overlooking Wenceslas Square.

The square should have been full of protesters. But the people of Prague had decided not to demonstrate, so as not to give the occupiers a pretext for a massacre. So the square was empty.

To show just how empty, Koudelka stuck his own arm into the frame, wristwatch facing the camera, marking the exact time.

And this image became iconic.
No tanks. No soldiers. Just an empty street and a watch.
And somehow, that said more about invasion and history than a photograph of the tanks themselves ever could.

Worth knowing what it cost him: Soviet soldiers spotted him up on that roof, thought he was a sniper, and came after him.

I was in China during the beginning of the pandemic. Being in Chengdu, a city of 15 to 20 million people, it was surreal for me to go to places and find them empty.

The subway was empty, the main shopping areas were empty. This square in front of an Apple Store is always full of people. So I also used Koudelka's method, of showing what wasn't there.

You do not need to show everything.
Sometimes showing less says more.
But you need to have some context.

THE THIRD FORCE: LIGHT AND COLOR

The third component that defines how a photograph feels is the light. Simply, how the combination of light and color works, and makes you feel. There's enough here to discuss for hours, but at its basics, it works like that.

Composition arranges the elements, including light and color.
But light and color decide how those elements feel.

Saul Leiter spent decades photographing New York, mostly the two blocks around his own apartment. He shot through fogged glass, rain-streaked windows, half-obscured reflections.

Technically, a lot of his frames break the rules. Soft focus. Obstructed subjects.

But the light, the way color bled through a wet window, the way a red umbrella glowed against grey rain, that's what made those photographs unforgettable.

He once said:

"A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person."

For him, it was never about the subject. It was about the graphics of the shapes, the colors, the light, the aesthetics, and how the image makes you feel.

For decades, almost nobody was paying attention to his work.
Then, late in his life, everybody was.

Light and color are mood. Learn to see it, that will help you a lot.

I have two pieces that go much deeper here: one on how to use color in photography effectively, and one on working with hard light and chiaroscuro.

THE FOURTH FORCE: POINT OF VIEW

The next one is your point of view.

We photograph the same subject.
With the same light.
The moment is the same.
But photographed from a different point of view, it will look different.

In a photography composition course we all learn that different angles will have a different impact on how the photograph is perceived. But somehow, a lot of us don't really explore that angles thing, and stay shooting from the eye level.

Your vantage point is part of your statement.

In 1971, Daido Moriyama stepped out of a hotel near a US military base in Misawa, in northern Japan, and saw a stray dog sunning itself in the street.

He didn't shoot it from standing height, looking down at the animal.
He got down, to the dog's own eye level.

Usually we would go somehow in front of the subject we photograph, but here he is photographing it from behind.

It was a stray dog. But that over-the-shoulder eye contact made this photograph feel like photographing an equal. A conversation partner.

It's now one of the most recognized images in Japanese photography, built entirely on where he chose to put the camera.

Low angles work great. Your subjects feel larger than life, and empowered.

High angles look great as well. Especially bird's-eye-view ones.

You can create a whole series of "lonely people," shot from the top.
Angles are limitless.

One exercise that's popular in photography universities is to choose one subject and photograph it from a hundred different angles. The key idea behind this exercise is to understand how these different angles explore the subject, but also its relationship to the environment.

If you want a structured version of that kind of practice, my 30 Day Composition Challenge has two days built exactly around this.

Where you stand is a decision.
Not a default.

THE FIFTH FORCE: EMOTIONAL CONNECTION

Now let's move to the last one. This is the one that ties everything else together.

You can nail the moment.
You can imply a story.
You can find beautiful light.
You can choose a striking vantage point.
And the photograph can still leave people cold.

In 1983, Mary Ellen Mark spent months on the streets of Seattle with a group of homeless teenagers, photographing their daily lives for what became the project Streetwise. One of the kids, a young girl who went by "Tiny," became the center of the work.

Mark's photographs of her are not technically flashy and they don't need to be.
You look at them and you feel like you know her, even from a single frame.

That's not composition.
That's proximity, trust, and time.

Mark kept photographing Tiny for over thirty years, long after the original story ended.

Emotional connection in these kinds of works breaks the simple compositional rules, because it manages to transform that connection into a viewing experience. You can feel that the photographer deeply cares about the subject they photograph.

Getting close enough for that to happen is its own skill, and it is mostly not a camera skill. I wrote about the whole approach in how to photograph people on the street.

Another great example would be Sebastião Salgado and his project Sahel. He documented the people suffering from the drought and famine across Chad, Ethiopia, Mali and Sudan. And their suffering is felt in every frame.

It's a very heavy kind of work to photograph, and it accumulated. Years later, after covering the genocide in Rwanda, Salgado said, "I didn't have any infectious diseases but my soul was sick." He stopped photographing people for years after that, and turned to nature instead.

But his care for the people he photographed is felt in every frame.

At the end of the day, that feeling is the actual test.
Not "is this well composed."

SO IS COMPOSITION USELESS?

Not at all, and I want to be clear about that, because it's the obvious thing to take away from an article like this.

For me, learning to compose images is the first step. The end goal is emotional resonance. If you manage to get there, you are a master.

Composition is still the skeleton. It's what lets you execute all five of these with intention instead of luck.

Think about the Erwitt photograph again. That moment was luck. The framing was not.
He worked his way toward that frame over sixty exposures, and when the moment arrived, he was already in the right place with the right composition.

But after you learn composition, the rest is all about you.

THE FIVE FORCES, TOGETHER

So: moment, story, light and color, point of view, emotional connection.

These are the five driving forces of a great image. And they don't show up on a rule-of-thirds grid.

All of them are the result of your visual perception, your observations, and mostly your heart.

If you want to work on the seeing itself, I wrote a longer piece on how to develop your photographic eye, and another on what actually improves your photography.

You could also try and take the 30 Day Composition Challenge.
These are 30 sessions, where you follow and learn to see one idea each day.
At the end of the challenge you will learn how to see a lot of what was hidden to you.

I hope it was useful.
Happy shooting.
And see you next time.