Composition Masterclass by Jonathan Chritchley

As a photographer who shoots exclusively in black and white, Jonathan Chritchley has developed a keen eye for the minimal composition. Here, he explains the stories behind three photographs that show off his style.

It’s often said that, in order to be a good photographer, you should have a passion for something other than photography. For Jonathan Chritchley, it was a love of the sea that brought him to photography, and the pivotal point was when he saw Luc Besson’s 1988 film The Big Blue.

“The first ten or 12 minutes are in black and white, and are beautifully shot,” he explains. “It took my breath away and I ended up watching that opening sequence about 20 times. Everything clicked into place: photography, the sea, and black and white.”

At the time, Chritchley was in his early twenties, and admits he lacked the knowledge and experience to get a photography business off the ground. As a result, he fell back on his second love – surfing – and ended up working in Biarritz, France’s surfing capital. Seven years on, and freshly armed with the marketing and business skills he had lacked before, he returned to photography and has never looked back. Since turning professional, Chritchley has developed a style for minimal, spare, monochrome images that have won him clients that include P&O Cruises and Ralph Lauren.

Speaking of his compositional style, Chritchley says, “I like things to have space. I tend to go wide, to give the subject room to breathe. Most of my compositions are about what’s not there rather than what is.”

Black Church, Iceland

“When I got to this little church – which is about three hours from Reykjavik – several other photographers were already there. They were all shooting it from the front, where some rather nice gates framed the doorway, but I went round to the back, where a field of long grass, battered by the harsh coastal winds, provided an excellent lead-in line. I decided that a very wideangle lens would reinforce the isolation and fragility of this little black building, so fitted a 21mm lens to my camera.”

“At first, I composed with the church placed much lower in the frame, because there was an amazing sky. However, it didn’t work, so I pushed the church up to the top of the frame. The wind was howling, and usually I would use that to my advantage to convey movement in the sky. However, this time, the foreground grass achieved this, looking almost like moving water.

“With a picture such as this, I tend to know what I want and how long the exposure needs to be for the effect I’m visualising. On this occasion, it was important that the movement in the grass didn’t detract from the church, which I knew I wanted to be the most important element in the frame. I like its darkness, and that’s what you notice first, before anything else. It tells a story.”

Fishing Nets, Aude, France

“This photograph was taken in the Aude – an area of the Languedoc in France – where there are lots of rootsy little fishing villages. After the fishermen have finished for the day, they hang their nets over poles to dry. I had spotted these poles and their nets in daylight earlier on in the trip, and decided to shoot them in low light.

“After some fairly hazardous 4×4 driving to get to the location, I set up my camera and started to shoot as the light faded. At first, there was some cloud cover, but then suddenly the moon appeared. I hadn’t planned for it to happen this way at all – it was just one of those lucky accidents that occurs from time to time. I tried to position myself with the moon placed to one side of the nets, and then on the other, before finally realising it had to be slap bang in the middle of the frame to really work for me.

“The moon, or should I say the Earth, moves surprisingly quickly, so very long exposures don’t work at all – one just gets a light-toned blur where the moon should be. As a result, for this image I used what is relatively speaking quite a short exposure – as you can see from the slight ripple in the water. I also fitted a longer lens than I would normally use – a 70-200mm telephoto – to compress the scene and make the moon appear bigger.”

Lowry Horses, Camargue

“There was a dawn mist and it was incredibly still when I arrived at this lagoon in the Camargue region of France at around 5.30am. This is a rare thing in the Camargue, as the Mistral wind often blows through the region, causing the water to ripple. However, on this particular morning, the stillness of the water meant the reflections showed only the barest ripple. In fact, I didn’t realise how good the reflections were until I saw the images on my computer later.

“There wasn’t a sound apart from the breathing of the horses and it was one of those moments when life outside of the viewfinder ceases to exist.

“Everything in this photograph happens in the bottom third of the frame – in the top two thirds there’s literally nothing, other than the gradient effect of the neutral density grad to hold back the brightness of the sky.”

This is a compositional technique I find myself using a great deal in order to create an isolated, minimal feel. And although I was working with moving, living creatures – rather than a landscape and long exposures – I still wanted to convey a sense of stillness, space and peace.

“I took more photographs and worked a lot more quickly than I would normally, because I didn’t want to miss the moment. Almost inevitably, this was the last picture I took. By this point, I had been photographing the horses for two or three minutes and their curiosity and friskiness was starting to get the better of them. The two horses on the far right went nose to nose, and the one in the middle pricked up its ears, taking a great interest in what I was doing. It then began to walk towards me, so the reflections – and the moment – disappeared.”

YOU CAN SEE MORE OF JONATHAN’S WORK AT JONATHANCHRITCHLEY.COM. HIS FIRST BOOK, SILVER, WHICH IS A RETROSPECTIVE OF HIS WORK OVER THE PAST SEVEN YEARS, IS AVAILABLE AT BOOMANDVANG.COM