Strange as it may seem, up until last week I hadn’t considered taking any photos of the buildings in Shanghai. I’ve already taken my ‘must-do’ shots – the obligatory photos of the ‘forest’ of skyscrapers (taken from my apartment balcony) and the view of the Pudong skyline from the Bund (both images below). But that was just to get them out of my system; and concentrate on the ‘serious’ business of creating some more original images.

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This year I’ve found myself using the square format more and more. I enjoy the challenge of composing within the square frame and ‘seeing’ images that would work well in the square format. Like the majority of photographers with digital cameras I don’t have a square format camera, so the process of working within the square format involves visualisation at the time I take the photo and cropping in post-processing.

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Last weekend we went to Hangzhou, a city around 180km south-west of Shanghai, by high speed train. It’s quite an experience; Hongqiao railway station in Shanghai is brand new (and enormous) and boarding the train felt more like entering a space ship. It was the smoothest train ride that I’ve ever been on – even at 300 km/h it seemed to be barely moving. We completed the journey in less than an hour.

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There’s no such thing as “correct” composition, just bad composition, good composition, and inspired composition.

At the beginning of the year I decided to analyse some of my favourite images to see if I could understand more about their composition. I’ve always been an instinctive photographer – I’ve never thought much about why I compose photos a certain way. I tend to know when the composition looks good in the viewfinder, and that approach has always worked for me. But what if I could identify some of the principles of composition in my strongest images? Could I then apply them consciously and improve my photography? I think so, and along the way I realised that I was discovering things that would be useful to other photographers too. The result is Beyond Thirds: A Photographer’s Guide to Creative Composition, released today by Craft & Vision.

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I thought Shanghai was a modern city. Until, that is, I walked away from the bright lights and skyscrapers in the centre and started to explore the older neighbourhoods. Some of these are simply undeveloped, and will probably be bulldozed and rebuilt in the near future. Others have retained their ‘old’ character for reasons of commerce and tourism, such as Yuyuan Garden in the Old City.

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