I was at the Autumn Moon Festival in Chinatown recently. They had set up a stage and were doing cultural dance performances from different tribes in China. This particular dance featured a girl dancing for her lover. I can't remember exactly what the story was, whether she was dancing because they could not be together or because she was trying to woo him or if she was already with him and was doing it for joy. The composition that I chose for this was to include the Moon Goddess on the banner in the background. The girl was flying around the stage doing various moves and I was lucky enough to capture her mid-leap with the banner in the scene. I ended up cropping out the rest of the photo to just include the girl and the Moon Goddess.In composing my shots these days, I am always looking for not just a beautiful image or subject, but rather a story to be told. A story told in a single frame is a very hard thing to do. Normally, you would start with a foreground and a background. Determine which contains your subject. Then you try to figure out what kind of story you want to tell. Once you figure out the feel or theme or story, then you can determine how best to tell it given the objects in the scene that you include from your foreground and background. In this example, I wanted to convey to the viewer that the girl is dancing like the Moon Goddess for some purpose...mimicking her to say how beautiful she is. Another example would be a laughing and happy child, with the background being a playground area in a toy store. It becomes pretty quick to do once you develop the practice of absorbing the scene into yourself and knowing the area you are in. Photography is also about patience, so you can wait for your shot if you are prepared. Photojournalism, in a very simple explanation. Foreground-Background; without both, you basically just have a portrait.
