Notes on composition and design, 1

This is the first in a series of posts which provides a detailed review of M. Freeman's excellent book "The Photographer's Eye". (I saw this recently on a list of the top books on photography, so it is clearly a favorite of a lot of people.) For me, I learn better if I write about the topic, so this blog post is mostly to serve to help me understand the subject of composition. Also, this book is great if you are somewhat scientifically minded - by which I mean you love laws and general principles. I'll try to summarize all I read as best as I can understand them. Please post comments, especially if there is something I'm not explaining well.

The subtitle is "Composition and design" so the book does not address in great detail the highly subjective issue of the emotional impact and subject interest of an image, though some discussion of that is present. The subject matter of a photo is its content. It could be concrete (such as a portrait or a landscape) or abstract (such as concepts or actions). The relationship between the compositional design of the image and its content is very complex. Despite this complexity, the point of view of this book seems to be to approach photography by first giving a good explanation of the composition and design principle.

To begin, the book starts with frame dynamics. Some subjects (such as a landscape) lend themselves to a horizonal rectangular frame, others (such as a full body portrait) to a vertical rectangular frame, while others (such as an abstract) can be presented using a square frame. Your subject to an extent determines the framing.

Design principles: The two most important principles of photographic composition are contrast and balance. Balance is the relationship between contrasting elements. In particular, a photograph of a solid white surface is, by this measure, poorly designed. It would indeed be a very boring photo!

An artist and teacher Johannes Itten who taught at the Bauhaus in the 1920's, used the following terms to describe some of the basic contrasts:

Aside form the composition of a photograph, the elements of the image which interest the viewer is also important. The Freeman book discusses visual principles next.

Visual principles

POI perception principle: The mind builds up its perception of an image from a series of rapid eye movements to the photograph's points of interest.

Gestalt perception principle: The mind leaps to its perception of an image from a recognition of the individual elements in the photograph.

Gestalt laws:

• Proximity: Visual elements in a photograph are grouped together in the mind according to how nearby they are to each other.
• Similarity: Visual elements in a photograph are grouped together in the mind according to their "sameness" to each other.
• Closure: Visual elements which are grouped together are seen to compose an outline shape.
• Simplicity (Occam's razor): The mind tends to prefer simple visual explanations (symmetry, simple shapes, balance).
• Common Fate: Grouped elements with an implied motion are assumed to move together.
• Good Continuation: The mind tends to continue shapes and lines beyond the place where they end.
  
• Separation: The order for a figure in a photograph to be perceived, it must stand out from its background.

Gestalt principles:

• Emergence: Parts of an image that do not contain enough information to explain them suddenly pop out as a result of looking long enough.
• Reification (fallacy): The mind fills in a shapre due to inadequate visual clues (see the Law of Closure above).
• Multistability: When their are insufficient or ambiguous perceptual clues, the mind tends to make elements of the image invert or "pop back and forth". (For example, the alignment of Necker's cube.)
• Invariance: (Less a principle than a property.) When objects can be recognized regardless of orientation, rotation, perspective, scale, lighting, or other factors, then the objects are said to be invariant.

Dynamic tension

Some basic graphical elements are more dynamic than others.

• Diagonals have more energy than horizonal or vertical lines.
• "Rhythm" (periodic patterns) create momentum and activity.
• Eccentric placement of objects induces tension.

Perspective and depth

• Linear perspective (this is what we usually think of as perspective in everyday conversation).
• Diminishing perspective (a special case of linear perspective where similar objects are getting smaller and smaller).
  

  bridge pylons

• Aerial perspective
• Tonal or color perspective (light or warm colors should be "close" and dark or cool colors in the distance).

This ends part 1.