The original photo was shot in 2007, I believe. Even then, not all of the then-current board members were available at the time of the photo shoot. I arranged for one of my coworkers, Kenton Rogers, to take one photo without the missing members, who were added later when they were able to come and sit for a photo.

The original photo:

Kenton later added the missing members:

Unfortunately, that edited version was never published, because we had to postpone publishing the magazine into which it would have been inserted.

This year we started working on the magazine again. However, the members of the board had changed over the years. We could not get everyone together for another photo shoot, so we had to update the photo that we already had. It was necessary to remove four members, and add one. But since the photo had not been taken with that end in mind, this step was a little more difficult.

Besides the four deletions and one insertion, it was necessary to move other members to fill the gaps, add missing body parts to the people thus moved, and fill in backgrounds where they had been cut out. (Computer novices may imagine that if you move a person in Photoshop, their hand that was hidden behind a piece of furniture will magically appear, and you will see what was behind them. But, of course, it doesn’t work that way. All those things have to be drawn, cloned, or otherwise added.)

The updated version for 2009:

It’s not a perfect arrangement, aesthetically. But considering what we had to work with, I think it turned out pretty well!

Another important part of composition is learning how to honor the subject. Although the background may be really awesome, if the subject is a person, the focus needs to be on them — even if it means cropping part of that oh-so-inspiring background out of the photo.

Consider this example, which I received for a 3ABN World article some months ago:

Before

In the photo, it appears that Rita is a midget; the top of her head doesn’t even reach the midpoint of the photo. You would think from this photo that the subject was an afterthought, and the photographer was more interested in an unobstructed view of the church behind. Not only is Rita situated very low in the shot, most of her body has been cropped out, leaving the background to dominate the photo. Even the less impressive parts of the photo — the dirt, the low bushes — have more space devoted to them. Looks like a job for Photoshop!

Although many people think of Photoshop’s selection and layer tools as a way to combine parts of separate images, they also work well for altering the parts of a single image. 

After

What we’ve done here is created a selection around the subject, copied it to a new layer, and moved it up in the photo. Although we didn’t have much of a person to work with, still in this setting she looks more important, more confident, and more up-close-and-personal. The church has not been altered or cropped, but now it appears more for what it is — a background object that merely provides context, rather than dominating the scene.

Of course, it would have been better to compose the photo correctly in the first place. But with a little care, we can improve the photograph without creating something that looks contrived.