The Geometry of Composition

[DREW WILEY]

I wouldn't discount the Greeks too fast. They were not only before, but ahead of R. Bacon. I even knew of top dollar picture framers who balanced
their top/bottom mat margins using golden mean ratios. I did for awhile, but once you factor in the amount of concealment under frame rabbets, shifting therein, blah, blah, I simplified it into 2:3 ratio instead. Now a lot of framers are just plain lazy and make all the margins the same so that
they don't have to reset their matcutter between cuts. The Greeks would have been incensed. The golden mean exists widely in nature. So I do think
it helps to study Art History and so forth. Otherwise, I never think about any of this when I'm actually under the darkcloth; and if it looks just right on my groundglass, that's what it's going to be.

 

[Saganich]

Isn't composition the most serious matter for photographers? And the least understood? Isn't understanding and recognizing compositional form and how it effects emotional state the rudimentary language of photography? What elevates photography from a technical manual to form of art? Weston is correct, but to "present it in the strongest manner possible" implies having a strong emotional relationship and knowing how composition changes that relationship. One person mentioned Minor White and Ansel as examples of people who didn't follow rules, which is incorrect, they advanced the compositional elements of painting into the new medium of photography elevating it to an artform. They spent the entirety of their lives thinking about the relationship between composition and emotions, but Matt K is correct that it is an ongoing study of correlation and not all people agree as they do about gravity.

 

[pdeeh]

gravity is just a state of mind

 

[Old-N-Feeble]

gravity is just a state of mind

No need to be so serious.

 

[pdeeh]

life's too mysterious

 

[baachitraka]

Okay. I drop everything expect dressing up properly.

 

[DREW WILEY]

AA was previously trained as a concert pianist. That fact actually has a tremendous bearing on his form of visual composition too. There is a lot of
poetic balance in his best images, and not just light and texture. And there can be little doubt that he understood quite a bit about art history, and
interacted with numerous well-known painters. In fact, his early supporter, Stieglitz, also championed a number of now-famous modernist painters.
I'm a strong advocate for photography and painting being two different things conceptually. But that doesn't preclude cross-pollination, so to speak.

 

[AlanC]

One thing I don't understand is why a lot of photographers seem obsessed with the "Rules Of Composition" yet painters don't give "composition" a second thought. When I trained as a painter, composition was hardly discussed as an idea in itself, for in truth composition is always a subjective part of something else more important. When I am painting, or taking photographs, I hardly give composition a conscious thought. I just let it fall into place.

Take a look at one of Rembrant's great self-portraits. Is its greatness because Rembrandt placed his left eye on the exact spot on the canvas that corresponds precicely with Golden Section mathematics? Of course not. The greatness comes from the painting being full of an unfathomable humanity and depth of feeling.
Mathematicians running a slide rule over great paintings have found all kinds of geometrical niceties. But the truth is that the artist almost certainly created these things quite unconsciously. To then make "rules" about these things for others to follow seems a rather odd idea to me.

Alan

 

[DREW WILEY]

Nothing could be further from the truth, Alan. The "rules" of any of the great painters were those best suited to their own ends, Rembrandt included.
I once spent about three hours studying in person what is perhaps his finest self-portrait in the Natl Gallery. A great deal of what truly makes it great is not apparent in books of over the web. I has to do with his interaction of color and impasto, which in the minds of many made him a step above Frans Hals. But those guys inherited an awful lot of visual strategy from the Renaissance painters just to get to that point, then bent it to their own intentions. He studied and practiced for that end over and over and over until he achieved it. And there was more than a little math involved, starting
with the discovery of true vanishing-point perspective. Loosening things up a bit later on didn't erase acknowledgement of the basis, even among the
Impressionists or Cubists. They studied art history to the point of literally dueling over the subject at times.

 

[DREW WILEY]

To postcript that before the end of the day, No, sucessful artist's don't work by some simple Copernican model of geometry, but using all kinds of protocols, both deliberate and learned, and intuitive. But I think a lot of photographers' work would be greatly enhanced if they weren't so naive about
art history. It's not a matter of mimicry, but of learning how to navigate certain almost universal visual problems. Color photographers are among the
worst. They confuse mere repetitive patterns with abstraction, and confuse color with honey and jam smeared atop sugar cubes - no nuance, no
modulation, no pauses between the noise to make it intelligible. As someone else stated it long before my time, Color photographers tend to confuse color with noise. But color also has structural quality. It can recede, advance, selectively imply dimensionality in ways that mere shape cannot. This
is something some of the best 70's color photographers began to play with, but nowhere close to the skill of painters. It's not that easy. You can't just
mix your colors, not even in Photoshop. You need to discover them in some manner that matches your film, and then somehow put that into the print.
That's what makes it such a challenge, which you can interpret either as a frustration or as a wonderful lifelong voyage.

 

[AlanC]

Nothing could be further from the truth, Alan. The "rules" of any of the great painters were those best suited to their own ends, Rembrandt included.
I once spent about three hours studying in person what is perhaps his finest self-portrait in the Natl Gallery. A great deal of what truly makes it great is not apparent in books of over the web. I has to do with his interaction of color and impasto, which in the minds of many made him a step above Frans Hals. But those guys inherited an awful lot of visual strategy from the Renaissance painters just to get to that point, then bent it to their own intentions. He studied and practiced for that end over and over and over until he achieved it. And there was more than a little math involved, starting
with the discovery of true vanishing-point perspective. Loosening things up a bit later on didn't erase acknowledgement of the basis, even among the
Impressionists or Cubists. They studied art history to the point of literally dueling over the subject at times.

Hello Drew, I think you are right about great painters being well informed about what earlier artists had done, and bending things to their own intention. Visual ideas that worked were not usually looked on by later artists as rules to be followed (if this had happened there would have been little or no change in painting methods) They were looked on as opportunities, and strategies for possible use. Rembrandt was greatly influenced by Carravagio's dramatic use of light. But I am sure he didn't look for a set of rules in Carravagio's work, so he could follow them. He built on Carravagio's example, and used it for his own ends.
I am interested in your idea that the greatness in Rembrand's work comes from his "interaction of colour and impasto" This is a bit like saying that the greatness in Don McCullin's photographs comes from his use of TriX...
Michael, I agree that a lot of conscious thought goes into sketches, pre-studies and preliminary drawings for possible paintings. I have drawers full of the stuff! But there comes a point in this planning, if you are lucky, when everything comes together, and you know unconsciously, intuitively, that you are onto something. Conscious analysis becomes irrelevent, maybe even impossible, at this point. The French painter Georges Braque summed it up best when he said that you can explain everything about art exept the bit that matters.

Alan

 

[flavio81]

I think this is a very complicated subject in terms of light and shade, form and tone and position within a given format. But is there a magic formula for this beyond the obvious golden section and rule of thirds?

MattKing's post is very good.

Once i got a book from my university library, it was a whole book on the very topic of image composition. This goes beyond just the "rule of thirds", of course.

Basically "image composition" is taking into account how the eye "looks" or "analyizes" the image and how, due to cultural or historical factors, certain ways evoke different sensations than others.

For me, composition in photography is extremely, extremely important.

But of course, if one thinks composition is just "use the rule of thirds" or "clearly separate subject from background", then it's much better to discard such "rules" altogether.

 

[Alan Klein]

I compose how it looks good to my eye and it often follows some rule or another if you were to examine it. I notice most of my shots are very balanced. I think that way; it's not because I'm following some rule. The "rule" is just an observation of what already looks good to our eyes and brain. If the composition is appealing to me than it should be appealing to a lot of other people because we're very similar. Of course, we're not all the same exactly, nor are we the same the same way all the time. These things then allow for creative and different experiments. Of course, most of them will fail because our brain hasn't changed. It still sees beauty in form the same way it had before. But once in a while, the change works.

 

[Vaughn]

The edges define the middle. That is about the only rule I have figured out.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Alan- I only put two and two together about Rembrandt by directly viewing his actual painting. I'd already seen plenty of original etching by him, and
many reproductions of paintings. He didn't just use a thick pallet knife. That's not what I mean by impasto. He selectively applied it with almost a level of genius. His buttons in books look like brass - just yellow. In the actual painting they shimmer like real gold. But I don't want to spend a lot of
time here explaining this. So otherwise, great painters break the rules so efficiently because they've deeply studied those rules. For example, if you
study Picasso's sketchbooks, he imparted a classic monumentality to even the freehand human form. This was the point of departure. He mastered it
first. And other than liberty with subject matter, Dali was a classicist. He drew like Leonardo but handled a brush like a Dutch minaturist. These are
obviously famous names recognizable by everyone. My own aunt was one of the most famous artists in America during the 30's and 40's, prior to
Guggenheim and the era Abstract Expressionists. But she spent ten years in Europe studying the old masters and even learning all kinds of traditional
pigment formulations. I inherited her slide collections (all moldy by then), prized art books, and even hand-ground pigments (nothing to laugh at, since her blue was ground pure deep lapis, just like Michaelangelo used, worth more per ounce than gold dust). Yeah, there are exceptions. But let's
take even a great Abstract Expressionist like Rothko. He studied color to the hilt. Nobody gets that much traction without knowing the background first.

 

[RalphLambrecht]

I think this is a very complicated subject in terms of light and shade, form and tone and position within a given format. But is there a magic formula for this beyond the obvious golden section and rule of thirds?

try the attached if you are mathematically inclined;follow your gut if you are not.
sorry file too large again.

 

[KenS]

take a look at fibinaci

I believe his ratio was/is 1.618 : 1

Ken