Skip to main content

Composition after the camera work


 

What influences the shape of a photographic composition?

From behind the lens of most cameras, your view of the world falls typically within a rectangular form, either vertical or horizontal.  Cameras may artificially allow you to adjust the field of view so as to more easily visualize a square or panoramic canvas, but in any event, the camera itself influences how you visually perceive the world.  In the end, it will often dictate the two-dimensional shape of your final work.  If you consider how you actually see, it is obvious that there no straight lines whatsoever at the edge of your vision.  We are wonderfully adept at defocusing and perceiving a cone of light, emphasizing the horizontal, in an arc of about 120 degrees.  And we instantly focus on detail, drawing our perceptual attention like a telephoto lens to movement, color and forms that have alerted us. 

 

Are there other influences which give shape to our final compositions?  Many.  Where will your image find a home?  On a wall, or in a magazine, cover of a book?  Does it need to fill the banner of web page, correspond the screen of a computer?  What sizes does printing paper come boxed in?  These are influences which subtly shape our final images.

 

My own experience has led me to three forms.  A perfectly framed image within the boundaries of a camera’s film or sensor can’t be easily changed.  That’s the final shape of a print in most cases.  No cropping necessary.  But if I’m creating narrative with multiple images, a story that moves and invites time along as a participant, I love long horizontal panels.    

And when the image abandons time and embraces stillness, I’ll take a square image over any alternative.  For years I used a 2-1/4” medium format camera and the images I acquired are more calm, settled, rooted, more peaceful than the images I capture with my rectangular formats.  I don’t think it has to do with current politics; it’s the natural dynamics of composition within a square.

 You may not agree.  I’d be curious to know.

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gerhard Richter and the lack of style

“I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings,” he says. “Because style is violent, and I am not violent."  A quote from Gerhard Richter. Richter painted powerful photo-realistic images for years before turning more intensively to abstraction.  I watched a movie several years ago which showed Gerhard preparing large abstractions for an upcoming exhibit.  I believe the movie was titled "Gerhard Richter Painting" and is available through Amazon.  I watched in fascination as he pulled entire lines of color across an existing field of colors, allowing the underlying areas to show through in some places, obscuring it in others.  I was excited by what I saw because it closely resembled work I was doing in Photoshop, generally with images from nature. I returned to my work and began interpreting Richter's approach in Photoshop; selecting a swath of the image notable for its colors or form, copying, then pasting, then...
Post a Comment
Read more

Looking back at summer

 Winter is closing in and I can't resist looking at garden photos taken when the richness of plant life and sunlight washed over us daily.  I was suffering the absence of family and friends, the horror of the pandemic, and endless ignorance from leadership; but was lucky to have an abundance of beauty nearby.   At 7,000 feet summer temperatures vacillate between forty and ninety degrees, often in the same 24 hour period.  During the peak of the day, leaf temperatures breech 150 degrees and no amount of water, which is scarce here, can heal the torment of the plants.  Shade from other plants, healthy layering of the landscape and ultimately, some shade cloth for the most delicate species is a requirement.  But looking back, it was worth it. Today, swirls of thin snow accumulate outside the door and Salida has assumed its late fall wardrobe colors of brown and pale straw.   I will return to garden images again this winter.  ... a good time...
Post a Comment
Read more