Basic Landscape Composition Formulas..

[Bernice Loui]

In response to this discussion:
https://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?149540-Your-Best-Photograph-from-the-Previous-Month-Critique-and-Discussion-Encouraged


It seems some basic Landscape Composition Formulas could be helpful for many as more than a few of the images posted are landscapes and could used some help with their foundational composition. Image composition is one of the foundational elements be it a sketch, painting, photograph or most any image on a flat print. Without this foundational setting, the viewer's eye will tend to wander about within the image with little if anything to draw the eyes of the viewer into the image. For any image to express what the image creator and it's subject is trying to share requires some basic foundational elements one of which is geometric composition of the image. Beyond this comes light, contrast, shading and all that.

*These elements of the image is FAR more important than all the yak about Foto Hardware bits from camera, lens, film, processing, print making, yaka_pixles and all that Techno yak.*

The intellectual and visual exercise would be to study and examine these examples of composition geometry then apply them to various notable prints, paintings, sketches and other 2D flat images to see then analyze their foundational geometric composition, why they are visually effective and how they can be applied to your creative image making.
https://shellielewis.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/how-to-use-landscape-composition-formulas/

Painters and other non-photographic flat 2D image makers from the past to present have an awful lot to offer photographers as photographic images share an awful lot with in common with these other expressive art forms.



Bernice

[Ulophot]

Hi, Bernice. I would choose the word principle over formula when speaking of composition. I don't pretend that I never used certain compositional rules. When I was first learning photography, the rule of thirds improved my images considerably, since I had no art background at all; it was a guide to thinking about using the implicit dynamics of "reading" in a rectangle, or organizing to give emphasis to the subject, and thus, to identifiy the real subject in the first place, and it's relationship to the rest of what was included in the frame. Nor would I deny this experience to someone else. However, in my view, composition in a much richer domain than formula can support, because the artist's actual subject may be something entirely unseen, just as in a poem, the subject may not be stated at all but conveyed to the reader or hearer by means of metaphor. I am a strong believer in visual metaphor.
Rather than applying a host of "formula" examples to existing art works, it may be more helpful to become conscious of how the eye moves in them, what is noticed first, what is noticed last, and what this has to do with the effect of the image on the viewer. The good artist, in my view, organizes the composition on the basis of what will best serve the subject, seen or unseen.

[Corran]

Perhaps best to be moved to the "On Photography" subforum to discuss.

And, as for discussing, I think it's just as important to consider non-traditional compositions, to break the rules once you know and understand them, and experiment. I think it's incorrect to say that a successful landscape must follow one of these "formulas."

Edit: Yes, +1 to the above.

[Bernice Loui]

Know the "rules" before breaking the rules applies.

Examples in the link are some of the basic geometric compositions commonly used. If one does not believe this is important to effective expressive 2D images, spend some time at any art museum, art gallery and other facilities that display 2D images then analyze them for basic geometric composition... to find these basic geometric composition forms or combinations of them in any given 2D image.

IMO, it is arrogant and naive to believe foundational form by mean of geometric composition is not with adhering to when one of the great gifts of the human condition is pattern recognition directly tied to emotional response then memory.



Bernice

[Corran]

You seem to have taken the comment(s) to the extreme - no one said these compositional techniques should be completely ignored and discarded. Only that one can and should consider other techniques, when done with intent.

One of the things I noticed while sitting in and/or participating in numerous critiques and discussions [of photographs in collegiate art classes], is that the successful artists were not those that adhered to "rules" but instead were those that could explain their thought process and decisions leading to the photograph in question, regardless of their adherence to paradigms.

[Oren Grad]

Perhaps best to be moved to the "On Photography" subforum to discuss.

Yes, done!

[rdeloe]

I've learned vastly more about composition from painters than from photographers. Painters have been at it for rather a lot longer than photographers. I've also noticed (as a gross generalization) that photography has invented its own "rules" of composition rather than building on the experiences of painters. As a fun exercise, try and find the "rule of thirds" and other photography composition chestnuts in books on composition for beginning painters...

An old but good resource that I found very useful is Henry Rankin Poore's little book Pictorial Composition: An Introduction. Another excellent and more recent book is Molly Bang's Picture This: How Pictures Work.

[Bernice Loui]

Early 1980's shortly after taking on this photographic interest, the group of artist friends went after me for being "composition inept". This was totally not tolerable for them, dragged me into all the art museums in the San Francisco area and made me study, look at and understand significant paintings and related flat images. What they did was more of a blessing and went a LONG way to improving composition skills and understanding the fundamental importance of composition structure in any 2D flat image.

Painters and art history has a LOT to offer for those interested in creative and expressive photographic image making.


Bernice



I've learned vastly more about composition from painters than from photographers. Painters have been at it for rather a lot longer than photographers. I've also noticed (as a gross generalization) that photography has invented its own "rules" of composition rather than building on the experiences of painters. As a fun exercise, try and find the "rule of thirds" and other photography composition chestnuts in books on composition for beginning painters...

An old but good resource that I found very useful is Henry Rankin Poore's little book Pictorial Composition: An Introduction. Another excellent and more recent book is Molly Bang's Picture This: How Pictures Work.

[Doremus Scudder]

Know the "rules" before breaking the rules applies. ... it is arrogant and naive to believe foundational form by mean of geometric composition is not with adhering to when one of the great gifts of the human condition is pattern recognition directly tied to emotional response then memory.
Bernice

+1

I, too, have learned more from painters than photographers about composition, perspective and, notably, placing the optical center of the image.

Most photographs end up with the optical center right in the middle of the image. This is due to cameras having the lens neatly centered on the film. Cameras without movements are stuck with this, but the image can be cropped to move the optical center around a bit. View cameras are even more flexible in this regard. Check out the paintings of Venice by Canaletto for examples of having the optical center of the image to one side; he used this.

My art history classes in university and gallery visits have taught me more about geometrical arrangement, creative use of perspective, figure/ground relationships and directing the viewers eye than any photographic resource I know.

Best,

Doremus

[Vaughn]

I have to admit that I go the other way...I ignore or break the rules, then spent time figuring out why the images did not 'work'.

Venice by Canaletto -- I can easily see what you meant, Doremus. I like his use of his artistic license to flip the scene, also. I can almost hear him (translated of course), "That turned out very well -- if I paint the mirror image, I can paint another just like it." Unless the website accident flipped the image...

[Doremus Scudder]

Vaughn,

What I'm talking about is where Canaletto places the vanishing point(s). In many of his works, it is significantly off-center. Check out " Il Bacino di S. Marco" here to see what I mean: https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/arts/canaletto-and-the-art-of-venice-exhibition-review-a-venetian-blinder-a3680911.html

If you follow the lines on the Palaso Dogal to where they converge, you'll see that that point is very far left from the center of the painting and corresponds to the position of the "eye of the viewer." This is different than, say, making an image of a receding row of buildings, which also places the vanishing point to the side of the image, but retains the central point of view for the viewer. (Hope that's clear.) I do this often with shift and/or cropping.

Best,

Doremus

[Bernice Loui]

Bonus points:

What lens (tele, normal, wide angle) would be used to created this object size rendering in this painting and where would the camera position be, what height would the camera be at?


Bernice



Vaughn,

What I'm talking about is where Canaletto places the vanishing point(s). In many of his works, it is significantly off-center. Check out " Il Bacino di S. Marco" here to see what I mean: https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/arts/canaletto-and-the-art-of-venice-exhibition-review-a-venetian-blinder-a3680911.html

If you follow the lines on the Palaso Dogal to where they converge, you'll see that that point is very far left from the center of the painting and corresponds to the position of the "eye of the viewer." This is different than, say, making an image of a receding row of buildings, which also places the vanishing point to the side of the image, but retains the central point of view for the viewer. (Hope that's clear.) I do this often with shift and/or cropping.

Best,

Doremus

[Vaughn]

Vaughn,

What I'm talking about is where Canaletto places the vanishing point(s)....Doremus
I assumed you were referring to between the columns, or perhaps the left column in particular.

Bernice -- I don't think he was consistant in the equivilent camera-height throughout the image.

[Leszek Vogt]

Can't say I use tiny bites from all the visuals I encountered over the years, but somehow my brain adapts the alt formula. Subject/s tends to determine my approach. As always, it's a personal thing.

Les

[jp]

Formulaic means the artsy photographer will be replaced by AI.

I think "formulas" is an honest word to use in reference to what normal photographers consider when discussing composition. Yes we have better words for it.


Maybe design harmony is a better word that composition. Composition is not separate from lighting, tones, etc.. it's all part of design that works together.
For an old book on this, consider Arthur Wesley Dow's "Composition" which is available free from google books and in inexpensive reprints.

Early modern photography was based on Dow's teaching or one step removed, and is generally not landscape, but does a nice job illustrating the possibilities of composition not based on shapes/rules/formulas.

[Keith Fleming]

I am glad I had an early introduction to the traditional principles of composition. They led me to start looking critically at the visual compositions I encountered. My analogy is that those principals were the doorknob that opened the door to better seeing. Of course, there came a point at which I realized I was falling into the trap of composing photographs using the "rules of composition" far too often and uncritically. Learning to move away from the classic rules is growth, and that's good.

Keith

[CreationBear]

Bonus points:

Am I right to suspect a trick question? I'm thinking a 25-foot tripod, a lens with an image circle measured in feet, and maybe five feet of fall...:)

FWIW, the Palaso Dogal plays a starring role in Casanova's autobiography--one of the more famous literary jail breaks!

[Drew Wiley]

Any rote formula or set of formulas is worth burning. An idiotic camera algorithm could do that. Autofocus, autoexposure, now autocomposition, or should it be, auto-compost? But some familiarity with art history can certainly help.

[Joe O'Hara]

I don't necessarily disagree with what anyone said above. In fact I would strongly urge anyone who wants to make better pictures to look at many, many successful pictures by others. Both paintings, and photographs--although I would say especially photographs, because there are things that can be done with the camera that were
never anticipated by the painters of the past. If there is a photographer whose work you really like, take a book of his or her work and study each
picture, and try to see what it is that makes it special, why the picture was made (it is usually not the subject matter itself).

And, study the art of China and Japan especially. The use of "negative space" (actually an oxymoron IMO in the context of picture-making), partially-rendered, obscured, or
hinted-at subject matter, all have much to teach us as photographers.

Then, look at the world, find something that moves you, and arrange the camera and lens to make the best image.

It is actually kind of striking the way the image "clicks in" when everything is just right. It's as though the composition lets you
know when it is as it should be.

And if you're not sure, try anyway. Film is still cheap (even TMax at >$2.00 a sheet for 4x5) compared to the value of our limited time. You may
surprise yourself, or at least learn something.

[DDrake]

I used to ask my sculpture, drawing, and design students to think of compositional 'rules' as 'strategies' instead, although 'formulae' isn't a bad description either. Or 'recipes.'

Want to make pictures perceived as pleasing and harmonious by viewers embedded in Rennaissance-through-Modern Western visual cultures? The strategies linked by the OP will probably help. But they are hardly universal, or something humans innately understand or desire. There are plenty of other visual traditions (including landscape traditions) that fly in the face of these. As Philip U. implies above, compositional ideas are often predicated on a viewer metaphorically reading the image—the fact that some cultures read right to left and some left to right (and most traditional cultures didn't read at all) should complicate easy notions of universality.

And there's a good argument to be made that compositional rules/formulae/strategies supposedly employed by artists from the Rennaissance through Early Modernism were actually post hoc rationalizations by 20th century art historians, trying to create an historical arc that lead inevitably to Formalism. As in, 'See the pyramidal composition used by Gericault for Raft of the Medusa? Well, Ellsworth Kelly's doing the same thing, just without the figures.' You can find Golden Ratios in the Parthenon if you look hard enough; that doesn't mean the Greek architects put them there.

FWIW, I think Stephen Shore's excellent little book, The Nature of Photographs: A Primer does a great job of discussing how photographs work, without veering into airy-fairy subjectivity or arguments from dubious rules. Plus, it's 90% images, with a bare minimum of text.

[Drew Wiley]

The Golden Mean came from the Greeks. I don't think there's much doubt about its deliberate use in the Parthenon. They did have their own rules about visual balance. ... Otherwise, I'd hate to see anyone try to copy Stephen Shore's strategy for color, which was based on the hue errors inherent to Vericiolor L : poison green (cyan inflected) juxtaposed with pumpkin orange in almost every picture. He likened it to having just exactly the right amount of tension on the line when fly fishing. Good analogy. In anyone else's hands it would have been an awful hue clash.

[Vaughn]

Good points, joe.

I make both platinum prints and single-transfer carbon prints. The single-transfer prints by their nature, reverses the image. I usually have one or the other process in mind when I decide to make the image. I do rough composition before setting the camera up, then do the majority of the work on the GG. I must do some mental gymnastics (automatic now) to translate what I see on the GG into what I expect the image to end up being. I no longer notice that the image on the GG is upside down, unless I want to. The image on the GG is not backwards, so the gymnastics I do is basically how I flip the GG image...just rotated 180 degrees for platinum prints and spun it on its horizontal axis for carbon prints. Occasionally an image will work in either process. If I think it might, I'll expose two sheets of film -- each exposed and then developed for its specific process.

Once processed, negatives go on the light table, emulsion up or down depending on the final process to be used. This lets me judge the images -- I often take compositional risks and am either pleased or disappointed in what I see. Every negative is a learning opportunity. For example centering the subject -- I love breaking this rule, but also pay for it occasionally with an image I decide not to print. A couple of centered images...a 16x20 SGP and an 8x10 pt/pd print;

[Drew Wiley]

Remember when Eggleston would put the conspicuous subject of a print smack dab in the geometric middle of the picture, breaking every compositional rule on the books?

[LabRat]

As simple as this sounds (but not always easy) is to remember that when we are looking at the world, we see it in 3D, but our camera sees it in 2D, or our picture looks flat in depth... So we have to bring up information from close and far that provides the viewer some sense of depth... This is called layering, where we have some contrast between close and far (or even far to very far) to provide some spatial information so someone's brain thinks "depth"...

The ideal is where we can have areas that are brighter and darker, as this establishes depth well, that's why we like dark trees in the foreground framing our scene (dark in foreground tends to stretch the depth, and the style of darkening skies also...

If we can put information on different layered planes, it can break the 2D effect, and produce different illusions of space...

Steve K

[DDrake]

Hi Drew,
I've been reading the forums here for a few months, and always appreciate your straightforward posts. Having said that, there's a pretty well-referenced summary of disputed use of the Golden Ratio/Golden Mean/Golden Section/Golden Rectangle in the Parthenon here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio). While there's clearly true believers, there's also plenty of doubt.

Regarding Shore's The Nature of Photography: for those who haven't read it, the focus is photography in general, not the photography of Stephen Shore. Of the 80 or 90 photos in the book only five are the author's. And again, it's not really a how-to book, but more how-photographs-function (visually). To your point, he writes about the ability of color to add another layer of description to an image, as it shows "the color of light and the color of a culture or an age." I think about that a lot—Shore's photographs (and others from the same era) read differently now than when they were first taken. As do virtually all photographs. Which is part of why talk of 'timeless' images doesn't make much sense to me.

Eggleston somehow gets away with doing all sorts of things and still making fantastic pictures.

[Bernice Loui]

Stephen Shore (not heard of this photographer until mentioned by Drew, had to look), photographic images follows the classic composition rules, he applies more than one to his images which is precisely what any artist will do once there is enough understanding of classic composition forms (formulations) then applied to express in the image making process.

Sample image as presented on the web in color:
192580

Same image with color removed to easier illustrate foundational composition forms which follows and uses the more than one classic composition forms.
192581

This analysis should be applied to any expressive image as a means to dissect what tools the artist is using and why they are effective.
It's all part of the learning process.

Color images are an adder to the basic foundational geometric forms within any expressive image. It can be a distraction or an adder, just another expressive image tool in the box. For any color image to be truly effective the basic foundation of composition must be there or the image becomes "trying to hide" using color.



Bernice

[Alan Gales]

Know the "rules" before breaking the rules applies.

Examples in the link are some of the basic geometric compositions commonly used. If one does not believe this is important to effective expressive 2D images, spend some time at any art museum, art gallery and other facilities that display 2D images then analyze them for basic geometric composition... to find these basic geometric composition forms or combinations of them in any given 2D image.

IMO, it is arrogant and naive to believe foundational form by mean of geometric composition is not with adhering to when one of the great gifts of the human condition is pattern recognition directly tied to emotional response then memory.



Bernice

I completely agree with you, Bernice.

After High School I attended the local Community College for Commercial Art. The classes I took there helped me immensely when I later picked up a camera. When asked how to improve one's photography I always recommend art classes, especially Composition 1 and 2.

I ended up becoming a Sheet Metal Worker instead of a Commercial Artist and kept photography as a hobby. That is another story. ;)

[Bernice Loui]

There are those who take up Photographic image making initially in color then in time, possible they will venture into Black & White images. Some will discover their images being less than satisfactory, yet do not fully understand why. The difficulty often comes down to a lack of understanding basic composition as color images can hide foundational problems with composition.

Any view camera can be an excellent composition teaching tool as the image maker is often forced to slow down their image making process and consider the image they are trying to create. In the world of small sensor digital where the cost of image capture is the cost of using up memory and power with the ability to capture images in rapid succession tends to be far less conducive to deeply ponder and consider image composition. Yet, once good composition skills have been properly learned and well understood, they can be applied to any image creation tool or format. Or, why this very basic artistic tool is so very important to effective and expressive image making.


Bernice

[Drew Wiley]

Yes, by pre-framing your composition within the confines of a big ground glass and thoughtfully studying that, which the slower methodology of a view camera helps you do, you learn a lot. But there are also photographers who use big cameras just like they do small ones, and don't seem to learn much at all. They just want bigger machine-gun kill. A lot of calendar types were like that.

[j.e.simmons]

Years ago I studied several books of Atget photographs. One thing I took away that I could apply to my own photographs was that he always had differing and interesting corners. He seemed to pick an image subject, be it store window or ragpicker, then frame it compositionally by choosing the corners.

[Jac@stafford.net]

[...]
IMO, it is arrogant and naive to believe foundational form by mean of geometric composition is not with adhering to when one of the great gifts of the human condition is pattern recognition directly tied to emotional response then memory.


Formal composition is as import to understand as it is to misunderstand. When it works its pragmatic virtue is what matters. It helps to realize some cultural perceptual differences, too, for example a culture in which media was presented on scrolls, the part that rolls off (top or side) implies that composition continues beyond the immediate frame.

Psychology studies perceptual errors. Apophenia: False pattern recognition. Also see Patternicity. There are more terms or topic headers, of course, but a challenge to 2D artists is to exploit them when appropriate. That is not breaking rules. It is creativity.

Rule One: don't be trapped in your culture's proclivity to hard metrics just because they are easy to explain.

(aside: I love this old video (https://youtu.be/yUQRbqc2qtY?t=30))

[Bernice Loui]

Aka, understanding and appreciating the way Nature really is to the very best of one's ability then trying their best to make a deal with the way Nature really is in a Symbolic effort for a given intent & goal.

The human eye-brain-mind is often and easily fooled in various ways.


Bernice.





Psychology studies perceptual errors. Apophenia: False pattern recognition. Also see Patternicity. There are more terms or topic headers, of course, but a challenge to 2D artists is to exploit them when appropriate. That is not breaking rules. It is creativity.

Rule One: don't be trapped in your culture's proclivity to hard metrics just because they are easy to explain.

(aside: I love this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xmTTzCAALc))

[Tin Can]

Great video. but all the data is upside down from my POV.

Art rules are for the timid.

Rage, rage against the dying of darkness...


Formal composition is as import to understand as it is to misunderstand. When it works its pragmatic virtue is what matters. It helps to realize some cultural perceptual differences, too, for example a culture in which media was presented on scrolls, the part that rolls off (top or side) implies that composition continues beyond the immediate frame.

Psychology studies perceptual errors. Apophenia: False pattern recognition. Also see Patternicity. There are more terms or topic headers, of course, but a challenge to 2D artists is to exploit them when appropriate. That is not breaking rules. It is creativity.

Rule One: don't be trapped in your culture's proclivity to hard metrics just because they are easy to explain.

(aside: I love this video) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xmTTzCAALc)

[Ken Lee]

http://www.kennethleegallery.com/images/forum/CaponigroStonehenge.jpg
Stonehenge
Paul Caponigro, circa 1970

A critic or analyst can identify certain principles at work, but that's always after the fact. What makes a really successful photo is the combination of basic formulas with a sense of surprise or discovery.

Without the elements of play and spontaneity, this game would have been over a long time ago.

[Kevin J. Kolosky]

To which I would add that in many respects our beautiful earth is already wonderfully "composed".

Too many words are wasted defining and categorizing what we instinctively enjoy looking at. What is wrong with looking at a photograph and just saying, "I like it" without having to define it? Or again, trusting the language that is photography, and let the photograph, and that thing that is portrayed, speak for itself.

[Bernice Loui]

Can the artist attempt to give a truthful, creative, expressive "voice" to the beauty of Nature without stunting their innate-inherient Beauty with human intentions?


Bernice



To which I would add that in many respects our beautiful earth is already wonderfully "composed".

[Tin Can]

No if we use a device. Perhaps yes if we use only human memory as we are part of the environment.



Can the artist attempt to give a truthful, creative, expressive "voice" to the beauty of Nature without stunting their innate-inherient Beauty with human intentions?


Bernice

[Kevin J. Kolosky]

The "artist" certainly didn't create nature. He/she saw something that in his/her own mind thought was significant or special and decided to make an image of it, hoping that somebody else might in some way think the same or close to it. Its fine if people want to waste a lot of words defining it. A lot of people earn their living doing that. When I look at photographs I don't need anyone to tell me whether its "composed" properly, or its good, or wonderful, etc. All I need to do is look at it, and what is being portrayed, and I instinctively know whether it speaks to me and what it says to me. That might not be what the "artist" intended it to say, and that may be one of the risks of "putting it out there" to be judged, but that is a risk you have to take if you want to be a so called "artist".

[goamules]

http://www.kennethleegallery.com/images/forum/CaponigroStonehenge.jpg
Stonehenge
Paul Caponigro, circa 1970

A critic or analyst can identify certain principles at work, but that's always after the fact. What makes a really successful photo is the combination of basic formulas with a sense of surprise or discovery.

Without the elements of play and spontaneity, this game would have been over a long time ago.

Exactly what I was thinking. I glanced at that "formulas for landscapes" page and thought, "one can take just about ANY photograph, and overlay one of those many formats and say 'SEE! I'm using the cascading diamond formula'!" Except....it was not intentional. Um, yeah:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48104413626_d9cb7a0281_o.jpg

There are lots of sites where people draw lines and circles on photos and retroactively explain how good the photographer composed. Other than taking a mountain vista shot but having the mountain obscured by a big tree 6 feet in front of the lens, are there any "wrong" landscapes?!

[Jac@stafford.net]

Can the artist attempt to give a truthful, creative, expressive "voice" to the beauty of Nature without stunting their innate-inherient Beauty with human intentions?

Nature necessarily transcends art. Nature exists without us. My wife has been a gardener for over 65 years and her mission is to grow and multiply what nature gives her. As a photographer all I can do is a poor representation of specimens. That being said I am moved to appreciate any examples where the camera can, by its inherent qualities especially time factors, can expand our appreciation. Some macro work is similarly enlightening.

[Drew Wiley]

if Caponigro's own comments are a help, those megalith shots simply felt right at exactly one particular spot or angle of view. I don't think one can do something like that if it's not instinctive and spontaneous after a certain point, and you no longer need to clutter your mind with formal "rules" of composition. It just looks right on the ground glass. In this case, there's a distinct tension between the rocks as visual elements in a precise relation between one another, and with the moon too. I can identify with the style. If you can't somehow feel the Gestalt and overthink a composition like this, you've lost it to begin with. Same with the values, heavy in this case. Never underestimate the importance of the raw psychological imprint. Sensitivity in that direction is worth more than all the art manuals combined.

[lloyd]

"To see through, not merely with, the eye, to perceive with the inner eye, and by an act of choice to capture the essence of that perception. This is the very core of the creative process."

Minor White

[Drew Wiley]

Bingo. That's a pretty tame statement for Minor White. But if he had thrown his entire heap of metaphysical jibber-jabber out the window, I doubt his images themselves would have suffered an iota. So let me quote Caponigro as his student, "I just wish he'd shut up".

[Chester McCheeserton]

192657192658

John Baldessari had some pretty influential ideas about composition, art, and photography.

Egglestson famously quipped that his pictures were 'based compositionally on the confederate flag.'

a person who I didn't see mentioned yet (although she's in Shore's book) is Jan Groover. There's a video online of her that shows her photographing and mixing chemistry.

Also Vaughn, really like your first picture of the waterfall.

Also Canaletto's nephew Belloto has some pretty great paintings that seem like they could be related to camera use too.

And I completely agree that looking at Atget's pictures, both what he aimed at and how they were put together, would be more instructive than any sort of rules based on language.

[Drew Wiley]

It would be pretty hard to excel Atget, at least later in his life.

[Doremus Scudder]

Here's a great image by Belloto of my erstwhile hometown, Vienna (I lived there for 30 years until just recently; I broke my leg in a bicycle accident not far from where Belloto set up his easel for this image about 10 years ago...).

At any rate, it too demonstrates well what I was referring to about placing the "optical center" of the image not in the center of the image frame. If you follow the converging lines of the trees and promenade, you'll see that they converge on the horizon well left of center. I love this compositional trick and use it often to give a sense of space and extension to the long side of the image.

https://www.oceansbridge.com/shop/artists/b/baz-bey/bellotto-bernardo/view-of-vienna-from-the-belvedere-1759-60

Best,

Doremus

[Drew Wiley]

But notice that the steeple on the horizon is laterally in the center; so there are rules within the rules, breaking the rules, just like an image I'm printing today.

[Merg Ross]

"To see through, not merely with, the eye, to perceive with the inner eye, and by an act of choice to capture the essence of that perception. This is the very core of the creative process."

Minor White

That quote accompanied the photography exhibition, Perceptions, which opened at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1954. Minor had a hand in organizing the exhibit, although he had already left San Francisco for a position at Eastman House before Perceptions opened. In the exhibition catalog, Minor's quote is on the opposing page to this quote from William Blake: "Man is led to believe a lie when he sees not thro' the eye."