Chapter 2. Composition In Pictures - Visual Weights

***(Continuity Note: Please scroll down below this posting to view Chapter 1 first).

‘Composition is the plan, placement or arrangement of the elements of art in a work. The general goal is to select and place appropriate elements within the work in order to communicate ideas and feelings with the viewer. It is the primary element in photography…’ wikipedia.

In the last posting (scroll down to the posting below this one if you have not already read it.) I covered the main ancient system used by artists to do exactly this… i.e. The Golden Section and the rule of thirds.

These formula’s however have their own back story… subtle elements working together inside the mind of the photographers ‘aware’ and synchronistic subconscious. This is the visual vocabulary the photographer uses ‘to compose’ with… and it is this vocabulary that needs to be learnt and used ‘instinctively’ in order to make good images.

A photographer must decide at the outset… what is the focus of the picture? …building the picture accordingly… leading the eye of the viewer through ‘the story’ of the picture… holding the viewer inside the frame until the story in the picture has been explored… It’s story telling.

Like any good writing it ‘s best when we listen to the inner voices constantly bombarding the subconscious with thoughts and ideas when we assess an image… sending messages… creating a sense of comfort or awkwardness created by maybe an unfinished line that’s too straight or one that’s not straight enough.

Working in the background. Leading the viewer along the visual pathways running through the picture… pathways which may take vertical, horizontal or diagonal paths.

Some lines create visual illusions that give a sense of extra depth… like a road winding away from the lens that leads the eye deeper into the picture.

Jagged angular lines create drama and movement... like the balletic mix of hard black shadows and the shafting contrasty light of the bright early morning sunshine below, in a place in Africa they call the city of gold.

Light and shade can direct the eye straight at things.

and every picture has lines in it… some we see easily… some we don’t… but they are always there and they have a very real effect…
Things like the uprights on a building… when they are meant to be straight… they need to be straight… or not be perfectly straight for a reason… to make a point…

…like here where the confusion of disorganized uprights actually provide the back ground to the life of this young housewife living in the chaos of an african township… Obvious continuous lines coexist next to less obvious broken lines… everywhere.

Our eye will unconsciously more easily follow or ‘read’ continuous lines joining different elements and subjects as our eye always travels naturally along strong straight lines… like buildings outlined against a sky for example or a horizon line… these are strong elements in a picture… which is why it becomes so important to get the horizon line straight… it’s also why it’s always good to use a tripod to control this.

‘Hand held’ you have to be very good to get horizon lines perfectly straight… every time.

Horizontal, Vertical, Angled and curved lines all contribute to creating different moods.

The angle to frame and the size of a given line decides the influence and power the line has in an image. Also the tonality of a line… it’s colour and repetition or length all tell a story.

‘Straight, horizontal lines, commonly found in landscape photography, gives the impression of calm, tranquility, and space whilst an image filled with strong vertical lines tends to have the impression of height, and grandeur. Tightly angled convergent lines give a dynamic, lively, and active effect to the image. Viewpoint is very important when dealing with lines in photography, because every different perspective elicits a different response to the photograph. Too many lines without a clear subject point suggest chaos in the image and may conflict with the mood the photographer is trying to evoke’ wikipedia.

We often create strong flowing lines in an image quite naturally without consciously realizing it. Our eye follows these easily and enjoys them as they flow through or across the image

…it’s the ‘affect and effect’ of whatever organic or geometric edges contained within the frame… feel for the emotional resonance given off by things… the warm grey surface of stone, white flowers, a window, glass, a painting, a red silk dress etc… all edited together to make the image say what you want it to say... try sensing the faint bat squeak of how these things make you feel… listen to your inner voices.

Highlights and shadow areas bounce back different emotions… surface textures give off different feelings… a crisp white table cloth… the clean & romantic.

As opposed to an oily rag and a discarded spade…

…dirty & dramatic… but with more contrast & drama…

…the photographers stories unfold through how textures make the viewer feel…photography is a lot about half sensed feelings, whisperings in the subconscious…

A sense of colour and texture is an important thing to develop… the pictures below are very much about colour and contrast helping tell a story… bright African sunlight creating a sense of a sun – baked world…

…a hot sunlit ‘township Africa’ sense of place...

Whilst the image below uses the opposite… a subdued watery, moody English end of day feel as the last fishing boat wends it’s way home from the sea… squalling hungry sea birds following the smell of the fresh catch… the Christian Dior (10 dernier) silk stocking stretched over the lens caused the moiré pattern screen clash in the sky when I printed it…

…normally I wouldn’t like that... but for some reason in this image I liked it… that’s not to say I won’t have a go at it in photoshop soon though… just to see!

And the graveyard in Venice at dawn seemed to need a sombre moody… black and white in colour ‘feel’ …an eerie selenium toned cold purple…

The spectral world of the dead… aptly interpreted on fast infra red film…

Color and texture are strong elements when used to create different atmosphere’s… a good example of this can be seen clearly watching the movies… for example traditionally ‘film noir’ movies, like ‘The Maltese Falcon’ or ‘Citizen Kane’ were shot in shadowy Black + White and deep focus… imaging similar in feel to the picture below.

…and over the years ‘the black + white’ original noir look ‘morphed’ into the look of ‘Point Blank’ ‘China Town’ ‘Year of the Dragon’ ‘Taxi Driver’ ‘Usual Suspects’ & ‘Carlito’s Way’

A ‘noir’ style of color developed and that’s what the next pictures are toying with… a pastiche of that movie poster look… influences for a lot of my images come from the movies… naturally as it’s the other main ‘photo’ drama 'genre' …and I worked for many years as a film director and lighting camera man..

In recent years ‘Stills’ have traditionally been lit with flash… and ‘Movies’ with tungsten or H.M.I. point source incandescent ‘lamps’ …like in the picture above… what’s often described as ‘movie’ lighting… I was taught to use both and that’s what I was playing with here…

(I'll elaborate more on these two techniques in the next posting)

Mixing the genres of German expressionist films and paintings like Tamara De Lempicka for example… in colors redolent of the latest prints released of Fritz Lang ‘Metropolis’ …an old movie worth looking at for its interesting use of lighting and color washes...

Where are these streets ? ...the cold blue eyes… the faintly androgynous Dietrich ‘Nazi’ ambiance… a noir narrative…

…below we have a more up to date version of similar ‘genre’ influenced work… a ‘fashion pastiche’ …more American in style

Whilst the colorful image below takes us into references from another visual world altogether…the more Baroque world of painting… a celebration & a photographic exploration of painting… the other great visual influence in my life and that of many other ‘creative’ photographers…

I often use paintings as an influence… pre-Raphaelite… impressionist expressionist…photorealist… or otherwise… film references are usually about drama whilst painterly references are usually more about poetic romance… the difference between jazz and classical music…

…and the dimensions and proportions of images and shapes have a huge effect on the power of an image…

…and sharp jagged edges create a sense of unease and tension…

…whilst smooth rounded edges give off a more gently seductive emotional response…

…all elements contained within an image, particularly curves… should be working together…helping build the bigger picture.

…like in Framing the Image

Framing is a technique used to bring focus to the subject

How you frame images keeps the eye focused on the focal point of the shot… taking the eye to the heart of the frame... showing us where our image ends and begins… adding a sense of depth to a picture…

Pro’ Photographers work the frame consciously… finding ‘the frame’ carefully deciding the exact edges of the picture area they are using to tell the story with… often the edges of a picture make the picture...

Perspective… vanishing point… use the arrangement of objects or elements in a frame to create a sense of perspective or depth... drawing the viewers eye into an image… using eye catching light areas or shadowy dark areas of an image… to lead the eye… taking the viewer on a journey of discovery.

…and it’s usually best to keep things simple...

…less is more.

Busy images with a lot happening in an overcomplicated frame can be distracting… the story starts becoming difficult to follow… like trying to read an overcomplicated book that confuses… rather than communicating clearly.

Unless you want to deliberately create busy images…

...like bustling city streets

...deliberately creating an apparent vision of confused activity…

...like this picture above… it’s a kind of noisy active storytelling… and maybe it takes a while to see the ‘spliff’ or ‘Joint’ in the hands of one of the school kids buying ‘ganja’ on the street…

Generally however… Less is more… the less distractions the more clearly the viewer gets it…gets the story…

The picture above is influenced by the style of another era… a quieter time… the simple ‘primitive’ farm animal paintings from the English Victorian era of great amateur painters.

I find it helps me to think of my images in some kind of visual genre… putting things into some kind of visual context… in this case Victorian painting.

Start to look for the different visual weights of things… deliberately try to think more like a painter than a photographer… try to notice what draws the eye most… and why? …and decide is that the direction you want the viewers eye to go in… like in the picture below...

You can also draw the eye by limiting the focus.

One approach to achieving simplification within a photograph is to use a wide aperture when shooting to limit the depth of field. When used properly in the right setting, this technique can place everything that is not the subject of the photograph out of focus… wikipedia.

...blurred foreground or background focuses the eye on the flowers in these two images.

Shallow focus also works in Reportage photography… this same technique works particularly well on the street… creating ‘hand held’ documentary picture stories… try using a long zoom working anywhere from 200mm – 600mm.

Look at using a lens ‘doubler,’ they are cheap and besides making the reach of your lenses longer they also give the image a less sharp but more moody dramatic ‘reportage’ atmosphere… and atmosphere is narrative… lets take a walk down my Street… it’s in Africa so it’s always busy… night and day…

If your shooting digital… think of the number of pixels of your camera as your films ‘character.’

It maybe that a Cannon 5D with nearly 13 million megapixales is too crisp… whilst a 350 D with only 8 mega pixels may create a more interesting ‘down & dirty street ‘atmosphere.’

…Like differences in ‘the old days’ that forced the photographer to decide on ‘a look’ …choosing between say a Hasselblad medium format… less grain…less maneuverability… or a Nikon SLR… more grain and more maneuverability… or the difference between transparency… more contrasty… or negative film… softer contrast… Fuji or Kodak… a brown bias or a blue bias… 50 ASA… less grain more contrast… as against 800 ASA… more grain less contrast… It’s all about textures...

…and whether a given film or number of pixels produces the right feel for the story…

…and you wouldn’t use the same ‘film’ look for a street scene as you would for a fashion / beauty picture…

…where you are looking for grainless glossy soft wet lipped succulence…

…On the street ‘grain’ ads atmosphere… and gives a high shutter speed… on film, Tri-x rated at 400-800 ASA would do the job… now I set my I.S.O. at 800 on the 350 D. (8 megapixels)…to create a similar atmosphere...

On the street you need to ‘snap shoot’ so you need a high ISO/ASA like 400 / 800 to avoid camera shake… shooting wide open… @ 2.8 or 3.5...

…this will help push up your shutter speed and also force the look of the final images towards a more ‘movie style look’ …because you are using a shallow plane of focus which graphically isolates and helps draw characters out from busy backgrounds…

Try using your lensing to get as near to the way you use your real eye… study how the eye ‘actually’ works… most people need to think about how the eye works as an information gatherer… it’s a can’t see the wood for the trees kind of a thing… because it comes to us so naturally we often don’t see how we see.

Try looking across a busy street… focus specifically on someone or something… a moment in a life… and notice how you loose your ‘sense’ of what’s around what you have focused on… as in the image below… you can’t look at the two kids by the tree and the girl crossing the road at the same time… unless you make a conscious decision to look at the image from much further back… and even then you’d struggle… particularly if you were trying to look at all the other characters on this busy street at the same time...

...this conscious switching or shift of focus is called ‘going from the overall to the particular...’

...I touched on this in the last posting but understanding this is so crucial to developing an inner dialogue with yourself about your own image making process that I felt I should labour the point even more.

The real close up is a view where you are seeing only ‘a particular aspect’ of a scene without being focused on ‘the overall’ scene… like with the girl below…

…a decision a photographer has to consciously make… before he hits the street… each approach leads to a subtly different story… and requires different lensing… and you don’t want to be changing lenses on the street… for lots of reasons…

…even in a 'medium' close up… you are focusing on a ‘particular’ element in a given scene…

…and therefore cannot view the ‘whole’ scene at the same instant...

You have to decide which story you want to tell…

It’s always one or the other… the wide story or the close up story ?

The answer to that?

Which tells the story in the most dramatic or exciting way possible?

This simple ‘conscious’ decision making process gives you control over your picture making…or more accurately over your ability to build a particular kind of narrative into an image… one of the mechanisms that takes the viewer to the heart of a story… or looses them along the way.

…and once you get the viewer to the heart of the story another game begins… the narrative having unfolded… it now needs to reach a climax… a necessary part of any journey…you need to build to the climax of the picture

The viewer must know why you took him to where you have led him to…

…experience some dramatic Closure.

…and from now on if you pass images and they stop you… start noticing why… start asking yourself how long does a particular image hold you for? …and why?

So start looking more guys! …photography is all about seeing… Practice seeing.
A good photographer must be watching… looking all the time… wherever he is… get used to feeling your eyes shifting focus…

Don’t just look at things... start to see the spaces between things.

…always checking whether you are looking at ‘the overall’ or ‘the particular’ …checking on where your brain and retina has fixed its focus… questioning whether you see an expressionist image; an impressionist image; or just plain reality…

On the subway or the street… in a café or on an airplane… make pictures in your head without a camera… this practicing will make you more intuitive when you have a camera in your hand… Like practicing Tai Chi or yoga.

Symmetry… another important element to deal with… is a tough taskmaster.

There is a natural rule in life… many things come in the form of two opposites… sun and moon… night and day… hot and cold… wet and dry… happy and sad… male and female… old and young… etc.

In composition there is ‘a rule of odds’ …it’s easier to make better pictures that are more comforting to look at when the image is composed with odd numbers of objects or elements…

…rather than even numbers… if you need to work with more than one object or subject it’s easier to work with three rather than with two... even numbers create an unnatural symmetry…

…we tend to sense the lack of nature because we know nature is usually random... unlike in the image of the bottle and glass above...

This picture is not a ‘pack shot’ …it has a sense of being ‘natural’… but it doesn’t have the more easily believable ‘naturalness’ of the cheese, the port and the knife, below.

The image above feels more like ‘painterly’ picture making... made with a camera.


The other is just a photograph... and at its best photography should be about picture making... more than just taking photographs.


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I know this posting is long… maybe one should read a bit at a time… but I wanted to keep all these topics together on the same posting as they are all about the textures and image creating that applies to most picture makers; except in the section on grain… but even that has a kind of relevance to painting and film making… whereas the next posting will be more about aspects of visual creation applicable more to photography per se.

So that’s it for now I’ll be back next posting with; Selecting camera height and viewpoint ; movement ; cropping… 'not unless you pay me!'; an ad photo shoot; Cartier Bresson; back lighting; catch lights; key lighting; fill lighting; bounced lighting; background lighting.

Any questions drop me a mail... Peace & love… The Noir-Outsider.

Chapter 1. Composition In Pictures - The Golden Section...

...a perfect way to learn photography is to study painting

Composition is the plan, placement or arrangement of the elements of art in a work. The general goal is to select and place appropriate elements within the work in order to communicate ideas and feelings to the viewer. It is the primary element in photography and an important concern in drawing. Wikipedia.

To take a picture you need to get the exposure and focus correct otherwise the picture ‘won’t come out.’
But what if it does ‘come out’ well but it’s a stillborn misshapen non communicative mess because the photographer doesn’t understand the disciplines and techniques of visual narrative?
The basis of all picture making is a sense of composition; whether it be photography, painting, drawing, printmaking, animation, film making etc.
Decisions about ‘lighting’ and ‘focus’ are similar to spelling and grammar in a written piece of communication. The ‘composition’ gives us ‘the overall’ message.
The Information. The Headline.
The image maybe a sexy woman. ‘The overall’ image... woman.
A wide shot shows us this.

She has a great pair of tits. Focus your eyes or camera on them and you are now focusing on. ‘the particular’

A ‘particular’ feature contained within the woman’s ‘overall’ image.
You cannot focus your eye on both ‘the overall’ and ‘the particular’ at the same time.
Control of when the switch from one to the other takes place is part of the journey artists take you upon.

This is a visual phenomena described by painters as focusing the attention on ‘going from the overall to the particular.’ The artist guides your eye. Taking you on an edited journey through the image... leading you towards what he believes is important.

Like an actor using his voice to draw the viewers attention to a particularly important and consequently more dramatized line of dialogue.
Leading you to a ‘particular’ point of view. The artists point of view.

Master photographers do NOT "crop" their pictures they pre-visualise the final image within the frame of the camera's view finder, mapping out the viewers visual journey through an image, like traveling a road across a landscape maps out the journey of a vehicle upon that road, building in the stops, detours or surprises along the way..?

Artists have been doing this forever using systems that define visual proportions like ‘The Golden Section.’ The difinitive "landscape" rectangular proportion similar in shape to 35mm film proportions, a cinema screen, or interestingly an upright magazine page laid on its side.

The Golden rectangle. Wikipedia.

A distinctive feature of this rectangular shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle with the same proportions as the first and this square removal can be repeated infinitely, which leads to an approximation of the golden spiral.

Approximate golden spiral (green) made of quarter-circles in squares successively removed from a golden rectangle.

Any artists and architects have proportioned their works to approximate the form of the golden rectangle, which has long been considered aesthetically pleasing. Wikipedia.

The Parthenon's facade showing an interpretation of golden rectangles in its proportions.

Then there is "The Rule of Thirds"

The rule of thirds is a guideline commonly followed by visual artists. The objective is to keep the subject(s) and areas of interest (such as the horizon) out of the center of the image.

Note how the horizon falls close to the bottom grid line, and how the dark moody areas are in the left third, whilst the bright highlight areas are in the right third. Wikipedia.

In paintings we see how complete and precise is the artists technical control over the geometric language hidden within the construction of his work.

The Master photographer must do the same in order to control his composition.

Without conscious composition successful pictures are usually unrepeatable flukes.
A photographers visual philosophy does not develop through ‘fluke’.
A ‘repeatable’ visual philosophy in pictures is not something based on accident.
And great photographers always use a strong sense of composition to develop a repeatable ‘ look’.
Study the history of photography and you can tell a John Loup Seiff or an Irving Penn at twenty paces.

Jeanloup Sieff (November 30, 1933 – 20 September 2000) was a practitioner of the photographic art of high fashion, and avowed a fidelity to the frivolous and superficial. His legacy places him in the top rank of fashion and art photographers. Wikipedia.

Jeanloup Sieff's work is unmistakable. The clean modern elegance of his images is combined with a cool sensuality influenced by the "new wave" film-makers of the 50s. A personal erotic vocabulary in his nudes and fashion photography is evident; long bare backs, delicate curves and lingerie. Wikipedia.

Irving Penn (b. 16 June 1917) is an American photographer known primarily for his fashion photography, Penn's work shows a unique vision and a wide range of subjects. Wikipedia.

Pablo Picasso. Penn

Three Asaro Mud Men, New Guinea, 1970platinum/palladium print, 1976. Penn

Penn's style. Composition, careful arrangement of objects or people, form, and the use of light characterize Penn's work. Penn photographs with great detail and clarity and his prints are always clean and clear.

Many times his photographs are so ahead of their time that they only came to be appreciated as important works in the modernist canon years after their creation. For example, a series of posed nudes whose physical shapes range from thin to plump were shot in 1949-1950, but were not exhibited until 1980. Wikipedia.

The visual style, the look, of a master photographer is hugely important… and part of that ‘look’ comes from the style of composition they each produce.
For example when someone contracts Annie Leibovitz for a shoot they don’t know how the image will come out… no one does… but they do know Leibovitz’s ‘ look …’ that’s the insurance policy against failure… that’s the clients ‘comfort zone producing’ guarantee.

Leibovitz is a noted American portrait photographer whose style is marked by a close collaboration between the photographer and the subject.

Leibovitz's portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Wikipedia.

Leibovitz's portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono taken the morning of the day on which Lenon was shot dead was an iconic moment in History Frozen in Time Forever...

Achieving this personal style or ‘look’ is one of the qualities that defines the ‘real’ artist photographer from the pedestrian snapper.
Masters of photography always have a personal all defining ‘look’ which is usually emulated by others; but almost always the original is the greatest.

And originality is their thing. There will never be another Helmut Newton for example.

Helmut Newton, born Helmut Neustädter (October 31, 1920, Berlin, Germany – January 23, 2004, West Hollywood, California, USA) was a German-Australian fashion photographer noted for his nude studies of women.

I can recognize his pictures from two rows away standing in a crowded subway.

Helmut Newton established a particular style marked by erotic, stylised scenes, often with sado-masochistic and fetishistic subtexts. A heart attack in 1970 slowed his output somewhat but he extended his work and his notoriety/fame greatly increased, notably with his 1980 "Big Nudes" series which marked the pinnacle of his erotic-urban style, underpinned with excellent technical skills. He also worked in portraiture and more fantastical studies.
Wikipedia.

Helmut Newton films.

                           

                      

Polyphemus the Cyclops.

What they see is not what everyone sees. The single lens forming a frame through which they view the world. Choosing "the point of view..." and needing to have a visual philosophy applies as much to photography as it does to painting.
There is one major technical difference however.

The painter prefixes and prejudges ‘the moment’ his picture is to communicate.
The image becoming frozen in his head as he paints.
In his minds eye the image becomes static fairly early in the process.

Whilst the photographer is usually searching for a ‘moment’ that he cannot ‘see’ easily amongst many moving movements.
This is one of the essential image making differences between the two mediums.

Photographers often find themselves composing ‘on the move’.
Consequently "seeing" good photographic composition comes more from our subconscious than from our conscious mind.

Only the subconscious is ‘instinctively’ quick enough to see and register the constantly changing and evolving plethora of detail within a shot.
See how an auto focus camera ‘searches’ for its focus when lined up on a picture like the one above... trying to quantify and respond to the movement that the experienced photographers subconscious eye senses quite naturally.
I can work faster manually, the lens never searches at just the wrong moment and it makes me concentrate harder... producing images with more defined edges of frame.

One thing Master photographers are always clearly obsessed with is this conscious and often mystical freezing of ‘the moment’.
Like the precision of a Samurai warriors sword play, a master photographer often picks his shots whilst moving and shooting at high speed.
Searching for one defining moment that’s often too fast to see until it’s past.
When a good photographer shoots 50/100 frames of something it’s often because he’s allowing his subconscious eye to lead him to the heart of the moment.

Freezing a moment in time forever is a powerful and mystical thing if treated with the respect it deserves...

A meditation on a moment lost as it is born...

Look carefully at Irvin Penn's potrait of Pablo Picasso and think about it for a moment. It's a visibly invisible map showing us what we would never otherwise see.

Like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ stepping through the looking glass, a picture takes us through a doorway into another world.

Alice surrounded by the characters of Wonderland in The Nursery "Alice" (1890)

*Lewis Carroll (see appendix 1.) who wrote ‘Alice In Wonderland’ was an acclaimed Victorian photographer.

Photo of Alice Liddell by Lewis Carroll. (1858) wikipedia.

With the advent of Modernism tastes changed, and his photography was forgotten from around 1920 until the 1960s. He is now considered one of the very best Victorian photographers, and is certainly the one who has had the most influence on modern art photographers. Wikipedia.

‘Alice in Wonderland...’ after all is this not what photography is all about..?

A "framed" doorway into a wonderland. There is a link here I think... but it will only become more apparent when we know more about the workings of the subconscious mind, which we have already postulated plays a large part in photography as a medium.

It's too coincidental that a great phototapher created the mythology of "Alice in Wonderland" who passes through a framed looking glass doorway into a wonderland embarking on a psychadellic hero's journey that has resonated in the ears of generations of children growing up to become adults touched by the myth of Alice.

I suspect the concept behind this tale has a deep psychic and mystical resonants otherwise the story would have become unfashionable and have died a death by now... It seems to live on forever... like an old family photograph.

An old friend of mine once wrote a perfect description of the ‘true’ photographers condition.
He was one of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ 'top London fashion photographers.’

Terry Donovan always drove a Rolls Royce. A wink from "a Roller" helped interaction with the amazing chicks floating along the London streets in summertime.
Making him even more interesting, although he needed no help in that area as he was hugely intelligent and incredibly charming.
A fanatical martial artist. He produced ‘Yellow Dog’ the first British Kung fu movie.
Very cult at the time.
Donovan was shooting all the time. For Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Harpers + Queen and Cosmopolitan. He shot a Pirelli calendar which is as good as it ever gets for a pro photographer… it’s like getting an oscar.

Pirrelli calendar.

He shot over 3ooo television commercials. Directed music videos like the sexy award winning Robert Palmer ‘Addicted to Love.’

                    

Robert Palmer- Addicted To Love

Uploaded by ghovingh

As well as directing, he was the lighting cameraman and his own producer.

What is written in the front of his book of erotic pictures explains something fundamental about the nature of photography and the photographer. I came across his book recently ‘Glances’. Gathering dust on my bookshelf. Blowing off the dust I read something that sent me back in time like only music, taste, smell and words can… And photography!... I quote an echo.

‘I have often considered the evaporative qualities of human life, also that of my own craft of photography. I ask you to look out of the window.
If there is a street, there will be people moving through it and across it, vehicles passing either fast or slow.

I ask you to consider the notion that none of the objects, people or vehicles will ever re form in that precise order again that you are now observing them.
That moment will glide away into events that have passed irretrievably.
This in a larger sense is the situation that every photographer finds himself in if he has an observant eye. In his brain, he is continually bombarded with evasive images.
These are evident briefly, then they skitter away untrapped.
So here are my glances from a life.

After many years as a fashion photographer I would never be so foolish as to try to isolate and distinguish what it is that is so powerful about the beauty of a woman and the overpowering disturbing tactile images that have presented themselves before my camera.’
Terry Donovan. London. 1983.

See ‘Glances’ by Terence Donovan published by Michael Joseph. London.

Just as...

"if P(-(square root of 3) over 2, -1 over 2) or 7(pye) over 4 radians c) 19 (py) over 8 radians..."

or

...the I Ching are ancient formulas... so too composition is an ancient formula.

Leading the eye… to a strongly ‘sensed’ but invisible climactic moment… showing us things that otherwise would run through our fingers like the sands of time.
Master Photographers develop a sixth sense for this.

How can I develop this sixth sense?

The true answer is I don’t really know. I can only tell you what worked for me.

I studied painting before photography and got fascinated by the history of art.
As my photography began developing I kept going to Gallery’s like the National Portrait Gallery or The Tate Gallery in London... really studying the paintings and it was there that I started to grasp what was meant by ‘good lighting and composition’.

A way to study and learn photography is by studying painting.

And apply the lessons to your own photographic images.

Leonardo Da Vinci's illustration from De Divina Proportione applies the golden ratio to the human face. Some suggest that his Mona Lisa for example, employs the golden ratio in its geometric equivalents.

Try looking carefully at Leonardo’s work or any other great painter before you start to shoot next.

ADDENDUM: A psychologist once explained to me how important it was for a leader of men, an army officer or film director for example... to listen carefully to the opinions of his men because if everyone (all trained professionals) disagreed with his decisions then he should think twice about those decisions... if however everyone agreed... without any persuasion... then he was being given authentic external confirmation of the correctitude of his decision making process. And I am always searching for external confirmation that what I am writing is not twaddle.

For me "wikipedia" is "the oracle" come alive.

I have used edited sections from wikipedia to qualify and add professional external confirmation of the validity of my references, facts and opinions. I could have read these sections and re-written them myself... but I wanted the authentication that only someone else's qualification and opinion gives to a history of photography. One needs an accurate historical piece, filled with authentic reference.

Should you like to check the back-story out by looking at more images of the photographers works... Penn, Sieff, Liebowitz, Newton, Carroll or the formulas of classical composition... "The Golden Rectangle..." "The Rule of Thirds..." All of this can be found on wikipedia under the correct keywords.... Thank you wikipedia the "oracle"

endix 1. Lewis Carroll
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson ('Lewis Carroll') - believed to be a self-portrait

His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass.

His facility at word play, logic, and fantasy has delighted audiences ranging from children to the literary elite, and beyond this his work has become embedded deeply in modern culture, directly influencing many artists.

In 1856, Dodgson took up the new art form of photography, first under the influence of his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, and later his Oxford friend Reginald Southey.

He soon excelled at the art and became a well-known gentleman-photographer, and he seems even to have toyed with the idea of making a living out of it in his very early years.

A recent study [Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling's Lewis Carroll, Photographer (2002)] exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over fifty percent of his surviving work depicts young girls. Alexandra Kitchin, known as 'Xie' (pronounced 'Ecksy'), was his favorite photographic subject. From 1869 until his giving up photography in 1880, Dodgson took at least fifty exposures of her, the last of which just before her sixteenth birthday. However, before attempting to draw any conclusions about Dodgson's proclivities or obsessions, it should be noted that less than a third of his original portfolio has survived. He also made many studies of men, women, male children and landscapes; his subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues and paintings, trees, scholars, scientists, old men, and, indeed, little girls. His notorious (and possibly misunderstood) studies of nude children were long presumed lost, but six have since surfaced, four of which have been published.

Photo of John Everett Millais and his wife Effie Gray with two of their children, signed by Effie. (c1860).

He also found photography to be a useful entré into higher social circles. During the most productive part of his career, he made portraits of notable sitters such as John Everett Millais, Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron, Michael Faraday and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.


Dodgson abruptly ceased to photograph in 1880. Over 24 years, he had completely mastered the medium, set up his own studio on the roof of Tom Quad, and created around 3,000 images. Fewer than 1,000 have survived time and deliberate destruction. His reasons for abandoning photography remain uncertain.

With the advent of Modernism tastes changed, and his photography was forgotten from around 1920 until the 1960s. He is now considered one of the very best Victorian photographers, and is certainly the one who has had the most influence on modern art photographers.

The possibility of drug use

There has been much speculation that Dodgson used psychoactive drugs, however there is no direct evidence that he ever did. It is true that the most common painkiller of the time—laudanum—was in fact a tincture of opium and could produce a 'high' if used in a large enough dose. Most historians can infer Dodgson probably used it from time to time to ease the pain of his arthritis, since it was the standard domestic painkiller of its day and was to be found in numerous patent medicines of the time, but there is no evidence he ever abused it or that its effects had any impact on his work. There is no factual evidence to support a suggestion that he smoked cannabis. However, many people regard Alice's hallucinations in the Wonderland, when surrounded by teas, mushrooms and smoking insects, as references to psychedelic substances. This suggestion of psychedelic drug use made him extremely popluar to the counterculture of the 1960's and was a positive way of showing the main stream that one of there most famous and highly regarded writers also used these forbbiden substances. The band Jefferson Airplane also wrote a song depicting the book Alice in Wonderland as a psychedelic drug trip in the song White Rabbit .

Alice surrounded by the characters of Wonderland in The Nursery "Alice" (1890).