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Thread: Composition training and resources?

  1. #21
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    Re: Composition training and resources?

    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

  2. #22
    Eric Biggerstaff
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    Re: Composition training and resources?

    There is a neat little book titled "Picture This; How Pictures Work" by Molly Bang that is a good read on compostion. That said, I am of the opinion that the best way to learn is by doing and getting those whom you respect give you honest feedback. The challenge is getting honest feedback.

    I learned more looking at photographs in magazines and books than I ever did in formal classes when it comes to composition. Determine what you enjoy photographing and why; then find artists whose work you admire and dive into it. Study their work closely and figure out what it is about those images that draws you in. This will be a good guide to your own work and after a period of time your images will come closer to your artistic vision.

    Good composition is like an elegant woman; her hair, clothes, makeup and manner all work together to compliment her as a person. Nothing competes for attention. A good image does the same thing, all the elements in the frame work together to tell a story to the viewer in a simple, straightforward and powerful way. The art of elegance is being lost in the world these days, which is unfortunate.
    Eric Biggerstaff

    www.ericbiggerstaff.com

  3. #23

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    Re: Composition training and resources?

    Quote Originally Posted by rdenney View Post
    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.
    Yeah, questions. "Man is not judged by his knowledge, but by the quality of his questions."
    The first time I heard that it was attributed to Lao Tzu, but I really have no idea.... if anyone knows, I'd love to attribute it correctly. Great questiosn are truly amazing...

    Lenny
    EigerStudios
    Museum Quality Drum Scanning and Printing

  4. #24
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    Re: Composition training and resources?

    Quote Originally Posted by Greg Miller View Post
    Much of composition is about image design. Creati8ng a composition with the right details arranged in a way that guides the viewer though the image. If the light is wrong, or the wrong lens is used, or the camera is in the wrong place, then cropping usually isn't going to help. Can cropping help? Certainly in some circumstances. But everything else has to be right in order for that to be the case. Most of the poor images that I see have a lot more wrong in terms of composition than cropping.
    Understood. It was perhaps a mistake to muddy the waters of the OP's question with the idea of cropping. The idea was to expand the sphere of discussion. The fact is, I have many negatives shot in formats and perspectives that embody all the potential of a fine art print (so defined by me) – except by composing the original negative within camera, due to equipment and and environmental constraints. Virtually none of the 5x7 I film shoot is printed full frame. As Doremus, the approximate crop is almost always planned in the gg.


    ...and I still hold to my initial advice: get away from photography (and other photographers) to learn and appreciate basic composition.

  5. #25
    John Olsen
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    Re: Composition training and resources?

    Try taking a workshop from a good teacher. I recently was a teacher's assistant for a 3-day digital photography workshop taught by Robert Stahl at the Pacific Northwest Art School. His large slide presentation really refreshed my image perception, and after the workshop I went back with film to get new images where I had quit looking previously. Today I bought a new truck just to get back into taking my LF out into the further field. This workshop experience must have fired me up, even though I usually discount "mere digital stuff."

  6. #26
    C. D. Keth's Avatar
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    Re: Composition training and resources?

    Quote Originally Posted by ROL View Post
    ...and I still hold to my initial advice: get away from photography (and other photographers) to learn and appreciate basic composition.
    It's fine advice. Going to a museum and thinking critically about which paintings work and why is incredibly helpful to me.

  7. #27

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    Re: Composition training and resources?

    Originally Posted by ROL
    ...and I still hold to my initial advice: get away from photography (and other photographers) to learn and appreciate basic composition.



    Ridiculous. Nothing wrong with looking at painting and design and everything else. By all means, its actually a good idea, IMO. But "get away from photography"? That's nuts. You must be looking at the wrong photographers. There is a lot of great work out there, its quite instructional to look at what worked and what didn't. You want to deny the heritage?

    You want to dismiss Walker Evans, Frederick Evans, O' Sullivan, Watkins, Frank, Weston, Stieglitz, Lewis Hine, to name a few? Will you tell me that you weren't influenced by AA? You would not even know how to look without them. It's the height of hubris...

    We live in a media-saturated world. You can not be innocent.


    Lenny
    EigerStudios
    Museum Quality Drum Scanning and Printing

  8. #28
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    Re: Composition training and resources?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lenny Eiger View Post
    Originally Posted by ROL
    ...and I still hold to my initial advice: get away from photography (and other photographers) to learn and appreciate basic composition.



    Ridiculous. Nothing wrong with looking at painting and design and everything else. By all means, its actually a good idea, IMO. But "get away from photography"? That's nuts. You must be looking at the wrong photographers. There is a lot of great work out there, its quite instructional to look at what worked and what didn't. You want to deny the heritage?

    You want to dismiss Walker Evans, Frederick Evans, O' Sullivan, Watkins, Frank, Weston, Stieglitz, Lewis Hine, to name a few? Will you tell me that you weren't influenced by AA? You would not even know how to look without them. It's the height of hubris...

    We live in a media-saturated world. You can not be innocent.


    Lenny
    I don't think it's ridiculous at all, and I don't think the intention of that comment is to never look at other photographs. I think the intent was to suggest that somebody look at classical paintings and drawings first so you can study the evolution of composition and follow it through time. The "rules" have changed many, many times and just as you wouldn't read "War and Peace" before learning your alphabet, I wouldn't suggest that somebody study Steiglitz's and Weston's composition before studying Michaelangelo's and Picasso's. Sometimes composition in painting is easier to grasp for beginners because in the past it was often much simpler and bolder than now.

  9. #29

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    Re: Composition training and resources?

    Perhaps it would help if those of use who are advocating 'just look a lot' could say how we direct that looking to make it a learning process. (If indeed we do :-).

    I know that I made a conscious effort to break out of what I saw as the stifling conventions governing outdoor adventure and nature photography. It started with climbing photography, but rapidly extended to other forms of experience in the great outdoors. I think that 'getting away from photography' really just means paying attention to how other arts treat the same subject matter - this includes descriptive writing and poetry. Although conventions and blind spots do span the gaps between different media, they also - by definition - tend to run in their own limited groove and are much more noticeable from a wider perspective.

    So my first step is, and was, to survey how various arts and media have treated the same topic, and to try and work the good things I found elsewhere back into my photography. A concrete example would be the use of colour in landscape painting and printmaking, which is fabulously rich and sophisticated when compared to the habits of mainstream photography. I don't personally like to push colour to unrealistic or fantasy levels (and the whole IR thing leaves me stone cold in B+W or colour) but I do try and look for times and places where the palette is more nuanced than the usual Velvia summer flowers. Examples would be the oddball greens, oranges and magentas that flush the twigs of our local trees just before they break leaf in early spring, or how in twilight our scotopic vision turns powder blue weeds like chicory or cranesbill into intense little pools of pure colour contrast. It was looking at landscapes by Klimt, and watercolours from Rennie Macintosh, Klee and Nolde, which led me away from copying the established norms of colour composition in photography.

    A second lesson, which has now become a habit, is to attend critically to my own preferences, particularly when I come across something I find myself liking in opposition to my established tastes - a new thing that I like even though I would have expected myself not to. Arts appreciation usually warns against 'over analysing' the experience of enjoying art lest you suck the pleasure and emotion out of the work, but I personally think the risk is wildly overestimated.

    This is where going to museums and galleries, looking at books, films or other pictorial media, and even googleing suitably leading catchall terms is turned from a passive activity to an active pedagogy. Note that bad art, or art you dislike, can be just as instructive as good or pleasureable art, if not more so. You don't have to squelch your initial gut reaction, but rather, having given it time to sink in, allow yourself to question explicitly why you think you had that reaction. What about the work repelled or attracted you? How does the layout and framing of the subject matter speak to you? Is there a thread or narrative formed by the way the main components relate to each other, or a flow created by how they lie within the frame. Crucially, are there other works (perhaps in other media) which raise the same emotions or work in the same way?

    An example from my own journey would be when I switched from making images with a narrative flow or gesture to a more static style of composition which - I hope - encourages looking over reading. By narrative I mean the sort of landscape which leads the eye with the use of foreground and leading lines, and which has a clear explicative purpose, usually "this is beautiful". I still like - love - this style of landscape, but find its lack of emotional range restricts me too much in terms of what I can show people and how. My 'static' composition came from two wildly different traditions. One, that of all-over abstract painting and the geometry of pattern making and applied arts, is the way that certain patterns and structures make the frame irrelevant, in the sense that the viewer can easily imagine the pattern repeating on beyond the frame. The part shown by the photographer or artist is a choice of scale or magnification rather than a choice of position. My other form of static crops up on paintings of the uncanny (think Hopper, or more commercial work like Michael Sowa) where a sense of stasis draws you in and makes you look more attentively, and fosters the niggling feeling at the back of your mind that there is a message or piece of information there which you are not quite perceiving. The landscapes of Fay Godwin are my favourite photographic examplar, but it's there too in much classic photoreportage such as the work of Cartier Bresson.

    A final tip is to look hard at the interplay between your own tastes and the canonical tradition. If you hate something lots of other people love, you don't have to change your opinion, but it can be worth examining it. Neglected or minor artists are not of worth simply because they might be the next Vivian Meier - you can learn things from them without having to embark on a mission to make them popular. I personally have very little time for fashion photography or celebrity portraiture, but I have learned much about how pictures speak to an audience by considering why they are so very popular.

  10. #30

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    Re: Composition training and resources?

    Quote Originally Posted by Struan Gray View Post
    ...
    A second lesson, which has now become a habit, is to attend critically to my own preferences, particularly when I come across something I find myself liking in opposition to my established tastes - a new thing that I like even though I would have expected myself not to. Arts appreciation usually warns against 'over analysing' the experience of enjoying art lest you suck the pleasure and emotion out of the work, but I personally think the risk is wildly overestimated. ...
    Very well said, Struan, especially the quote above.

    @Lenny: I think "getting away from photography" means backing away from the compositional practice more specific to the traditions and techniques of photography and looking at other artistic media in order to find something new, or at least underlying, in the approaches of great artists from other traditions and techniques. I find this extremely useful. I find real instruction in the works of Mondrian, Whistler, and Rauschenberg in areas that I doubt I would find in photographs alone. I don't take this to mean one should eschew photographic traditions or looking at the photographs of others, just that there are often things to learn that come from outside our chosen medium.

    Interesting and informative thread.

    Best,

    Doremus

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