While researching the subject of photo trends 2020 we came across another interesting thing: candid compositions. The English-German dictionary translates candid with “sincere”, “honest”, “unapologetic”. This naturally raises the question of what a candid composition is. That is what we will explore in the following.

Sincere composition?

To say it right away: A sincere composition is not so easy to define. Despite extensive research we didn’t find a convincing definition. But on stockphotosecrets.com you can find the following text on the topic:

While authentic photography focused on real people in real situations, candid photography focuses on the photographer rather than the subject in many cases. Unlike deliberately posed portraits, which are specifically designed and staged to achieve a certain look or goal, the aim of a candid shot is to be spur-of-the-moment and sincere.

Since that didn’t really get us anywhere either, we simply took a look at a few sample pictures. And they looked something like the featured photo for this blog. The common denominator of all candid photos is obviously a composition that looks like a random composition, which actually looks like an ill-considered snapshot. In this sense, our featured photo is not a candid photo, because it not only looks like an ill-considered snapshot, but is an ill-considered snapshot …

The example photos had two more things in common. They all showed a low color saturation and blown out highlights. That reminded us a little bit of the bad smartphone snapshots. Well, nobody says that you can’t combine two trends.

Conclusion

This trend is convincing. However, it might be a real challenge for many photographers to capture these seemingly random compositions convincingly. Expect a lot of rejects.