Quote Originally Posted by Nathan Potter View Post
A really excellent thread and here is how I handle composition.

In the broadest sense composition comes from knowing what you are trying to show and say in a photograph. What exactly are you trying to communicate about the scene?
I find that if it's easy to say in words, it does not necessarily make a strong photograph. It might, however, make a dandy poem. I have to work at a more gut level than that.

Same with music. I can describe what I do, but I cannot express what it means, or even what I feel, in words. Well, maybe in very broad terms, such as "sad" or "joyful." But I think it takes more than that for the words to be useful.

Usually, it doesn't work. But if I try to express it explicitly, words come into play and the visual aspects recede.

Funny from my perspective that this comes up now--I was in Portland last week and spent an evening on my usual pilgrimage to Powell's Book Store. I spent some time looking at composition books, both in the photography section and in the art section. The books I found were slight expansions on 1. Rule of Thirds, 2. No poles growing out of people's heads, 3. Action drawing the viewer into rather than out of the picture, 4. Clean edges, yada yada.

I ended up with Andrea Stillman's Looking at Ansel Adams as well as Eliot Porter's Maine. I think I might get more about composition from looking at Porter's photos than from anyone's words about composition. And Stillman shows several of Adams's works in various forms, including various crops. The crops that look best with respect to his works seem to come from the same aesthetic as what Strunk drilled into White: "Delete unnecessary words!"

But Porter's work is often positively verbose, and it certainly does not always work in a thumbnail, any more than Pollack would. But he has a way of showing chaos as it is...meaningfully. Rather than trying to put order to it. I'd like to be able to do that. I think it's still, though, a matter of knowing what reinforces the idea versus what distracts from it. It's just that the idea can only be expressed visually.

The questions seem to be: What adds? What subtracts? Get those right and maybe the idea remains, whatever it is. The answers are visual, no more expressable in words than "that, and that".

I just don't often remember to ask them.

Rick "who likes the idea of following a master around" Denney