The Mind's Eye Guide to Composition: Painless Photographic Compositions

By Bob Wayland

We all own the most important piece of photographic equipment needed to be a good photographer, our mind! It is also the one that is most ignored, misunderstood and dismissed. This book is an introduction to the efficient and effective use of this tool. It is written at three levels; from the how-too level to what ever level you might want to go. Visual perception, in our mind’s eye, is the process that allows us to produce our photographic images: this is cognitive photography. We are lucky because we have spent our whole life training the brain to do this work! But the required final step of being aware and in control of those processes does require attention and study. This book is devoted to helping you enjoying making that final step.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781619278738

Book preview

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Albert Eίnsteίn

© James Robert Wayland 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except for brief quotas in critical reviews, without the prior permission in writing of James Robert Wayland.

Contact:

Bob Wayland

P. O. Box 51805

Albuquerque, NM 87181

[e-mail]

Web Site:

BWCognitivePhoto.com

Publisher:

BookBaby

ISBN: 9781619278738

Table of Contents

Preface

Organization of this book

Book One: Composition

1. First Images

2. Basic Forms

3. Scanning

4. Learning

5. Color

6. Perception of Depth

7. Guidelines

Book Two: Visual Signals and their

Processing

1. Detection

2. Perception

preliminary analysis

scanning

3. Analysis

scanning

driving forces

4. Color Vision

5; Depth Perception

Book Three: Technical References

1. Detection

2. Perception

connectionism

computational theory

Gestalt Theory

response functions

3. Color Vision

color phenomena

4. Depth Perception

5. Random Thoughts

Acknowledgments

Index

Is this book for you? How many times have you seen something beautiful, carefully composed a photo and taken the picture, only to discover that your masterpiece looks like nothing special? Have you ever looked at a photograph that you took and asked, Why did I take this? Have you ever wondered where the rules of composition come from? If the answer is YES to any question then you need this book.

Dedication

The women in my life have allowed me the leisure, the support that I needed to finish what I started so long ago in my quest for understanding visual art composition. My wife has taught me the necessity of careful and critical analysis coupled with an accuracy of phrase. My older daughter, Sarah, and her advanced training in cognitive science has been a great help in pointing me toward the current state of knowledge of visual perception. My younger daughter, Jennifer, has helped me to develop a joy that comes from creative endeavors and insights. She and my wife are deeply involved in scrapbooking, which helped me to understand the importance of having a story for each image I create. Clearly, this book is dedicated to these wonderful women.

Preface

When, as a teenager, I first started taking pictures, it was with wild abandon, madly pushing the shutter when anything made the mistake of being in front of me. Well, this was back in the ancient past where taking a picture involved film and all that went with it. Of course, I had only limited resources (mowing lawns and that sort of thing) and quickly realized that I had to get myself under control. Thus began my informal self-education of photographic processes, usually gained by studying carefully books on popular photography (Thank you John Shaw!). For me, it was heady stuff. After mastering the basics of exposure and which fixed lens to use, I ran into the mysterious brick wall of composition. It didn't take long to see that I needed an education in visual art composition; yes, the normal rules of composition, such as those associated with artistic visual images. But the rules had so many contradictions that I decided I was taking a course in advanced complexity theory. Having established that only a very small fraction of my images should be kept, I realized that I had to work very hard at making the best possible images, but I only had time to develop a set of quick and dirty rules. Of course, I got a lot of mediocre pictures. Then life got in the way of my photographic pursuits. But now I can accomplish what I started so long ago, this book completes what I began then.

When we first start perception and interpretation of what we are observing, normal physiological and psychological responses take over. This means that from a very early age, we are forming concepts of composition that guide our eye and interpretation of images; this is our outlook on the world around us, concepts that are unique to the individual. As we gain more and more knowledge, not only of artistic endeavors, but also from our experiences in the world, we form a unique set of compositional rules; perhaps it is better to call them guidelines. This forced me to ask a very important question: "What is the relationship of your psychological compositional rules (guidelines?) to those of formal art training? This book is my answer.

Let me digress just a little. It is impossible for me to learn or perform a new activity unless I have at least a rudimentary understanding of the underlying causes and principles. This book is my attempt to try to understand where our rules of composition come from. It is my purpose to give you an understanding of how psychological processes influence composition in the visual arts, then to compare the psychological processes to conventional (read cultural) compositional rules.

To begin to understand this process, we need to first think about perception. Recent developments in the mapping of mental activities (PIE, NMR, fNMR, etc.) allow us to begin to understand more clearly what the mind is doing with the incoming signals it receives from our sensory organs; yes-our eyes. The physical form of the incoming signals of light is converted into neural signals (that is, one form of electrical energy into another) What I will attempt to do in this book will be to provide you with an understanding of how our mind processes these signals and how to use this knowledge to make up good compositional guidelines.

No, I am not attempting to give a detailed description of the perception process of transforming the incoming signals into meaningful images, realize this is advance cognitive neuroscience, or more accurately in our case cognitive photography. Instead I will describe this process watching out for the key things involved. (Rather than bore you to death; this is done in the Part 2 for those of us who like to be bored.) The relationships of our mind's processes to establishing what makes a good composition will be put under the microscope.

How we look at art, including photography, has recently been studied in depth. All this has started to allow us to understand why we like certain images but it also tells us how viewers see our images and their beauty.

Of course, we all find certain books to be most useful. Some that have been especially helpful for me are books by Rudolf Arnheim and Robert Solso. Arnheim, in his books, The Power of the Center, Art and Visual Perception and Visual Thinking provide an understanding of the importance of art and its insight into the human condition. Solso gives great insight into the physiological processes and the psychological process of seeing. His book, Cognition and the Visual Arts, is particularly useful. I do not want to redo