artamaze by Katherine Hilden

In and Out of Focus

Posted in Composition, Cropping, Negative space, Seeing, Semiotics, tagged benthic entity, Biden, composition, Jefferson, Oval Office on April 22, 2021| Leave a Comment »

To get this shot the photographer had to have been sitting or kneeling on the floor at the edge of the coffee table with the flower arrangement. Seeing this photo in the newspaper (NYTimes) may have been shocking to some people who may have thought it simply was the only shot they could get from that event in the Oval Office. I don’t think so. I think it was the BEST shot. I think it was chosen among many because this view is artful and expressive.

To appreciate this photo with the out-of-focus flowers in the foreground, let’s remind ourselves of the standard Oval Office photo. (I have blurred out the faces to make it easier to concentrate on overall composition and the gestures of these four characters.)

Symmetry rules! Look at the placements of the paintings and the sculptures. Why are these important? Because symmetry conveys the feeling of rationality, stability and order. That’s what we want in our government. Even the placement of the four people is symmetrical in the photographer’s frame. Wonderful.

Then why is this picture comical? Because the rationality of the geometry in the picture is contradicted by the absurdity of the non-communication taking place here. The woman is articulating a point to which the man on the couch respectfully listens. These two are completely disconnected from the two figures in the background. In the chair at the left someone has arranged a department store dummy. In the chair on the right, two pectoral fins are flapping while a long ventral stripe defines this noisy benthic entity.

The drama in this photo, therefore, consists in the contrast between the rigorous geometry of the stage set and the disorder created by the characters on the stage.

Now back to the first picture, the one with the out-of-focus flowers.

There is no symmetry, not even Jefferson’s portrait is in the middle. No symmetry = no stasis = movement. Movement here doesn’t mean somebody jumping, it means excitement in the mind.

We don’t even get a sense of the three-dimensional space of this room. The photo looks like a collage. Your eye moves through this restless collage: flowers, man, portrait, lampshade. The focus is on Biden, partly because you recognize him as the president, but also because the lines of the portrait’s frame behind him converge on his head, like an arrow. Notice how the lines of the Jefferson frame direct your attention at the president’s head. But that masked presidential face occupies a very small part of the photo surface. What actually dominates the composition? The flower arrangement in the foreground! About a fourth of the whole photo! And it’s out of focus!!

Why is this important? Because we’re looking not at the documentation of an event but rather at a juxtaposition—yes, a collage–of elements that invite interpretation. Your mind races to see connections: Biden-Jefferson, flowers-environment, decisions-environment, past-future, known-unknown, et al.

So, this photo is a work of art.

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Glowing Prairie Grasses, Horizontal View

Posted in Composition, Cropping, Landscape, Negative space, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged backlighting, composition, diagonals, golden section, shadows on March 13, 2021| 3 Comments »

My prairie grasses glow backlit in the late afternoon sun. I grab the phone, step out the front door and frame the shot.

I love this glow. Oh, how I love this glow, let me count the ways.

What I mean is, if I put the glow in the middle of the frame, the picture will die on me. When we say a picture is “dead” what we’re talking about is our attention. When an image engages your attention it’s because the composition moves your eye through the frame and lights up your brain.

I can tell you how it lit up mine.

In my first shot I took a horizontal view because of the variety of diagonal lines formed by the A) crack in the cement, B) straight line of the wall, C) shadows of the grass and D) tree in the background. That’s nice because it’s the same element (diagonal lines) expressed by different shapes and reference.

The other compositional whammo is the Golden Section. This seems to be built into my retina, because here it is again.

In summary, we have three compositional dynamics working here.

The horizontal frame establishes a tranquil, thoughtful mood.
The diagonals, varied and upward moving, are restless, energetic and optimistic.
The Golden Section anchors you in our aesthetic tradition.

How can this be a worthwhile image to look at? It’s such an ordinary subject matter. If you frame this — not cropped!– somebody coming to your house could make a face and say, are you kidding me? What if you had it as an image filling your 50” TV screen! Ha, look at that.

Consider the composition, pure and simple:

In the next post we’ll go vertical to see what can happen there.

Depth Perception in Brown County

Posted in Achievement, Composition, Cropping, Illustration, Landscape, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged Brown County State Park, Fredric Edwin Church, Mary Shieldsmith, perspective on November 8, 2020| Leave a Comment »

The illusion of depth and perspective in an image is so beguiling that we—smart, scientific and skeptical—willingly suspend disbelief and get sucked into the illusion of receding space created on a flat surface.

You don’t have to trek through Ecuador, like Fredric Erwin Church, to get this thrill. Step out your front door and there you’ll find receding space as far as the eye can see even if that’s only to the end of the block. Your camera will aid you because it will flatten the view for you, i.e. it will compact the three-dimensional reality in front of you into a framed two-dimensional surface.

When you treat yourself to a hike in the nearby state park, well, the phrase “as far as they eye can see” is ecstatically notched up.

The most powerful part is (1) because it’s the closest plant to the viewer and it sets the sense of scale. All other plants—and that’s all we see—are therefore seen in relation to (1), with the result that we sense how far back they are.

You can compare this analysis to that of Fredric Edwin Church’s painting in the previous post.

The progression from foreground plants to distant hills –and pine trees way in the distance at upper left–occurs in similar layers. Church manipulates the gradations of color and light to heightened effect and just because he can. In the photo, however, the gradations appear more subtle and to lovers of subtlety that effect may actually be more thrilling than the technique in Church’s painting.

But wait, there’s more. Even before you notice the little plant in the lower left corner, you want to look at this image. It contains an approximation of the Golden Section. You may not even know what that is, but our environment, both cultural and biological, has conditioned you to like this ratio.

The photographer may not have made all these compositional calculations consciously. This sense can be cultivated intuitively.

Knowing how to analyze why this works does not in the least spoil the pleasure of perception. On the contrary, look how it deepens your experience.

(Click image for enlargement.)

Mary Shieldsmith , Brown County State Park, 2020

This Won’t Sell

Posted in Achievement, Composition, Cropping, literalness, Pattern, tagged lines and dots, no curb appeal on November 2, 2020| 2 Comments »

No real estate agent would like this photo. It doesn’t show off the house. No curb appeal! And what’s with the trees!?

Sorry, sir/madam, this picture is not about the house. It’s not even about Halloween.

Well, what then!!! –It’s not about anything.–Sound of doors slamming.

This is the last of three frames I took of this scene. The first two have too much context. Then I saw the juxtaposition of the straight vertical trees and the pumpkins marching horizontally. Click.

I saw an image, a play of lines and dots.

Here’s the first shot, rejected, due to too much information/illustration.

Walk-Zoom-Click

Posted in Composition, Cropping, Landscape, literalness, Negative space, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged Art and Illusion, E.H.Gombrich, Fairfield Porter, landscape on November 1, 2020| Leave a Comment »

The back-lighting stopped me in my tracks. The shadow was as dark as the tree trunk itself. They looked continuous as if they were of the same substance. The lawn looked as if it had been spray painted DA-glo. Mind you, this photo is not tweaked. My phone camera saw this strange light effect. Drama like this is momentary. Click.

I immediately zoomed in. No distraction, no nice residential context with a house. What we get now is…

…a repetition of forms. On the right, spiky triangles. On the left, and spilling onto the big triangle, you see amorphous meanderings.

Do we still have trees, lawn and late afternoon lighting? Yes, we’re still reminded of how wonderful these real lawns in our neighborhoods are.

We also have just the opposite: flat patterns on a flat surface confined in a rectangular frame.

Now it may dawn on you that you’re having an art experience. “Art does not stand for something outside itself” –Fairfield Porter, remember.

You can focus on the picture surface or what it represents, but not both at the same time — as Gombrich said in Art and Illusion.

But you can practice toggling back and forth between the two ways of seeing. Practice that!

Walking in the Neighborhood

Posted in abstraction, Color, Composition, Cropping, Illustration, Landscape, literalness, Negative space, Seeing, Texture, Therapy, tagged black/white photo, composition, landscape, shadows on October 31, 2020| Leave a Comment »

You’re walking in late afternoon when the shadows are very long. You notice that shadows can take strange, aggressive shapes on an expanse of lawn. Click. In the picture the shadow looks even stranger than it did in reality. Why is that?

Walk on. At an intersection you see shadows on the distant lawn. Click.

But you took a wide angle, getting the street into the frame of your camera. It’s merely a documentation of this corner of an unremarkable street.

You raise your arms and you zoom in on the distant lawn. Click. Now you have an image of triangular shapes on a green surface with some rectangle in the upper part of the frame. This is getting interesting. But you still have the street in there.

Now crop the reference to the street because it’s too much context, which makes the image point to something outside itself.

Why is this interesting? Because now you have an image that can be seen two ways: one, as a reference to a green lawn with triangular shadows cast by neighboring buildings and two, as a pattern of geometrical forms that refer to nothing outside of themselves.

If you want to see this duality even more clearly, take out the color.

Now you have an arrangement of shapes that “does not stand for something outside itself.” Is this art? Hmmm, maybe.

On second look, yes. Notice how the image has a unifying texture: the bricks of the wall have specks of black shadows that echo the specks of leaves on the lawn. This unifying texture has nothing to do with what’s being represented. “Art does not stand for something outside itself,” as Fairfield Porter would put it.

You can frame this, hang it on a wall, glance at it in passing and momentarily inhabit the realm of form, which is pure feeling. Like music.

Seeing Form in Tragic Images

Posted in Composition, Cropping, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged California fire in photos, Composition study on September 28, 2020| Leave a Comment »

For several days I’ve had a tab on my computer for this image of a recent California wildfire. I would open this photo, stare at it and feel mesmerized. What must that be like, to have left these houses or to still be in them? What is the sound of that enormous roaring fire in the proximate distance? How fast is it approaching? How terrified these people must be!

After several days of this intense emotional involvement with the scene in the photo, I noticed that I found the photo “beautiful.” Given the content of the photo, this was disturbing. So I asked myself if the photo was constructed to have this mesmerizing effect on the viewer. I turned on the part of my brain that does analysis.

What I found was a centrally focused composition. The houses in the middle of the image, i.e. the human interest, were perfectly in the middle. The house in the middle of this cluster stands out because it is brighter than all the rest. The hills on both sides sloped perfectly towards the middle of the cluster of houses.

Thus we have a symmetrical composition with human life in the middle. The symmetry makes it static with the message that this is not going to change. Human life in the middle hooks us emotionally. No wonder this image is mesmerizing. The composition tells us that this terror of the fire is enormous: it’s here to stay, permanent without any dynamic that may bring change.

You can be sure that the photographer took dozens or even hundreds of frames on this assignment. We don’t know if this frame came out as we see it here or if it was cropped to achieve this feeling of terror. Either way, it was not randomly chosen.

A second example makes this power of composition even clearer. The firefighter is in the middle of the frame. Because of the stability inherent in symmetry, he appears to be there forever. This makes his situation all the more hopeless and makes the image painful to contemplate.

You can test this out be cropping and moving him off-center. Now the composition is unbalanced and we feel that he is moving. He’s in danger but he’s at least not stuck.

Analyzing an image like this does not desentize you to its content. Not at all. You’re still shocked by the content but you’ve added the awareness of how emotions are communicated visually.