Writing Photographs

In a recent entry, I discussed the process of reading a photograph. I didn't make clear that this wasn't a linear and prescribed sequence of analysis which should be undertaken to enjoy a photograph. It was meant rather as a learning tool, to look at good photographs and to figure out what makes them good, what might have been put into the image to make it work that you hadn't noticed before, even though you might have reacted to it at an unconscious level, the whole point being that you could then use similar techniques in making your images.

Truth is, looking at pictures this way isn't fun - it's like when I took a speed reading course years ago to do better in my university courses (worked a treat), but it sure wasn't the way to enjoy a good novel - for that I went back to my old slow 'normal' way.

That raises the issue of whether one should or could consciously use these techniques to compose a photograph. In my own case the answer is 'sort of'. I think that what happens is I'm attracted to particular image by all sorts of subliminal messages and I consciously fine tune the image with a selected few of these techniques.

The result is an image in which some of the things that work were deliberately chosen, others while clearly being important to the image, were never planned. They're not pure luck though. Through looking at thousands of good images in a variety of styles and techniques covering many subjects, my eye sees these things and gets me interested, without me even thinking about them being there.

The bad news is that I don't know of a way to learn this other than pouring over lots of good work, including 'reading' the ones that interest you to undserstand why they work and how you too could use those techniques.

I suppose it's possible to learn these things in a short period of time and consciously try to work them in in the field. I suspect though that if you do it manually, it would be a bit like trying to recognize the face of your wife by going, ok, her nose is such and such a shape, right, this one matches, gee, the hair is different, could she have had it cut this morning, hmmn, that chin, sure looks like hers... and after several minutes you decide intellectually that odds are it's your wife, and you should say hi, and maybe even give her a kiss. It's simply not practical, and besides, see if you get any sex tonight after such a meeting. We just don't consciously process people's faces (as was mentioned in the comment by Matt to the previous blog entry) in a slow deliberate way, our brains learn from an early age to do it automatically and extremely fast.

This automatic technique filters perhaps millions of possible framings of a subject, and points out to you the ones that work on an unconscious level, and it's then up to you to polish the framing with the learned tools (or to reject the image as not having enough ways of working to make a good one).

Beginner photographers have very little 'automatic' ability to select good compositions and tend almost exclusively to simply notice things that are pretty or interesting or exciting, without any consideration to whether it photographs well, is suitably composed, or whether the reaction you have to it will ever show in the image. If they even bother to try to compose, it's a manual process with an incomplete knowledge of what works to make a good image. Is it any surprise they are then disappointed with the resulting images. Remember the old days when you had to get your colour prints processed and you'd get them back several days later, all excited at what you'd find, only to see a pile of images which contained none of the excitement you felt at the time or in anticipation. They'd be thumbed through and tossed in a drawer, never to see the light of day again.

Artists who lean to see, then who come to photography have all this behind them and 'pick up' photography at a demoralizing speed for those of us who grew into photography through the hobby way, as much interested in the equipment as the images.

Well, with effort, all of us can get both better and faster at automatically seeing good images, fine tuning them with knowledge acquired.