Composition rules, especially when it’s good

Fashion photographer Jake Garn posted up some food for thought on his blog yesterday. Suggesting that the #1 rule of photographic composition, the Rule of Thirds, is a “lazy sham,” he indicates that the Golden Ratio should instead be the imperative composition template because of its relationship to the very quick of the universe’s soul.

This is not exactly a groundbreaking assertion, considering that Google turns up roughly 10,000 results for “35mm golden ratio.” Alex mabini at Fotogenic, for instance, claims that the genius of Henri Cartier-Bresson is due to his adherence to the Golden Ratio, and that the rule of thirds is actually a “specific application” of the Golden Ratio:

Chris Weeks at A Photo Contributor also invokes Cartier-Bresson, and brings up the Golden Triangle as a way of justifying photos with sloping elements. He goes so far as to say that the appreciation of the Golden Ratio as an aesthetic guide might be “genetically programmed.”

One thing that all of these posts seem to have in common is that whatever guide is being used, it is not necessary to be exact – an approximation of the Golden Ratio in a photograh, for instance, will be enough to render the photo pleasing to the eye. Of course, making the assertion that the guide needs only to be approximate renders moot any argument that the Golden Ratio is preferable to the Rule of Thirds, as Jake Garn claims, since the Rule of Thirds is an approximation of the Golden Ratio. In fact, I could probably make up a rule of composition, such as the Rule of Three Blobs, and it would still be an approximation of the Golden Ratio, and I could still overlay it onto Cartier-Bresson’s photos to prove that he was a photographic genius:

Clearly, Cartier-Bresson approximates the Rule of Three Blobs about as well as he approximates the Rule of Thirds.

Nonetheless, it is not my point here to argue the merits of the Golden Ratio versus those of the Rule of Thirds, or any other rule of composition for that matter. I think that what’s missing in between the step of knowing a rule of composition and applying that rule to a photo is the ability to break the image down into basic shapes inside the viewfinder. Specifically, this means taking what’s in the viewfinder:

And simplifying it into the basic shapes that make up the scene:

Once the scene is composed of basic shapes, then those shapes can be manipulated and rearranged until they appear pleasing to the eye. Taking the “basic shapes” approach means that all of the elements in the photograph will be taken into account, in order to form an aesthetic whole; whereas the Rule of Thirds approach puts enough emphasis on lining up the “point of focus” with one of the thirds that the aesthetics of the frame as a whole becomes secondary. In the final product the basic shapes may show some analogy to the Golden Ratio or the Rule of Thirds, but that will be a result of the composition rather than a precursor.

Pinhole

It seems so long ago that I posted about my Pentax pinhole camera. I finally got the film developed and scanned, and to my surprise the frames that I thought would be overexposed weren’t, thanks I guess to the vast latitude of fast, cheap colour print film. Check out some of the better ones at my Flickr page.

Photography and the (Lost) Art of Seeing 2: Vignetting

I can’t trace the trajectory taken by Holgas from their invention in 1982 until they became available for sale at Urban Outfitters, but a quick browse through Flickr shows the indelible effect they and other “toy” cameras have had on (trend-driven) photographic sensibilities. Unfortunately, these sensibilities have spilled over the levees limiting the artistic use of crappy cameras to the realm of crappy cameras and into the unfortunately large underbelly of Photoshop. Yes, I have another gripe to add to my previous list, and that is the digital addition of vignetting to otherwise uninteresting photos, in order to give them the appearance of éclat.

A wise man at Photo.net, Steven Taylor, once opined that “the photos that capture the best ratings are almost exclusively over-saturated, over- sharpened, over-processed images that, no doubt, have little resemblance to the original file.” While this could be the talking point for any number of arguments that I’m not interested in pursuing here, one manifestation of over-processing that appears repeatedly in the top photos at Photo.net is fake vignetting. Browse through some of the top photos in the gallery and, once you get past all the nudes, you see a lot of photos like these:

Similarly, if you browse the “interesting” photos on Flickr, which are selected based on “where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing,” you get photos like these:

They’re even on Facebook:

The problem with fake vignetting is that it is so ubiquitous among highly rated and highly lauded photos that people seem inclined to believe that vignetting is desirable or even necessary for a good photo. Some photographers on Flickr go so far as to add vignetting to every photo they upload, as if having a photo any other way would be embarrassingly pedestrian. I sifted through hundreds of photos to get my Desert Roads group off the ground, and I was amazed at the number of otherwise good photos that were ruined by heavy-handed overprocessing. Do these people remember when vignetting was a lens aberration, that thousands of dollars went into designing and building lenses that wouldn’t have this problem? Have these people noticed that the tool they use to add vignetting is located under “lens correction”?

I can understand, and even appreciate, that some photogaphers, every once in a while, want to use a Holga to add some pizzazz to a roll of film; that photos taken with a Holga have some nostalgic aesthetic that makes them curiously attractive in moderation. But what is the attraction of adding vignetting to all photos, even those taken with a great camera? Where is the creativity in making all photos uniform? What is the lesson learned in giving nascent photographers the impression that post-processing is the be-all and end-all of good photography? Because of the overuse of Photoshop in general, and the ubiquity of fake vignetting in particular, collections of top-rated photos have become increasingly banal, and finding genuinely good, original, artistic and creative photos on the internet is becoming increasingly difficult.

Composition bias

Since I started a Flickr account a week or two ago I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through my photo folders, and I noticed that I have a tendency to prefer photos where the horizon, or whatever the main element is, slopes down to the left. I don’t necessarily take more photos that are composed like this, but I find the ones that are to be more aesthetic. I created this composite with the hope of demonstrating the slope tendency so that you can be the judge (note that this isn’t a representative sample of all my photos):

Uh oh

Drawn just endorsed fake tilt-shift photography. What with all the attention I’ve been getting lately for my vitriolic anti-fake-tilt-shift post, maybe we can collectively come up with a way to make this go away?

Does he wish his hand to show?

My rant about HDR and tilt-shift reminds me of earlier this year when I went to see the “TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art” exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery. When I sat down at one of the rest stations and started flipping through one of the art journals that was sitting on the coffee table, I was pleased to discover an article that chronicled the early history of debates over photographic post-processing, debates that go back to the 1850s (It’s here if you have access to JSTOR). I’ve heard people defend photoshop post-processing on the grounds that it’s a practice that has a long history (e.g. “Ansel Adams was the king of post-processing, and he’s the best photographer of all time”), but they tend to overlook the debates about post-processing that were raging even well before Adams’s time. If anything, citing the history of the debate makes me more steadfast in my anti-post-processing position, because after all, if people haven’t come to a conclusion after 150 years of debate, then why should we reach one now? On a related note, don’t get me started on free will.

Photography and the (Lost) Art of Seeing

Two online photography fads that are annoying me: HDR and fake tilt and shift.

High dynamic range photography (HDR) is a technique of digitally sandwiching multiple exposures of the same scene in order to increase the dynamic range of the photograph. (The “dynamic range” refers to the number of values in between dark and light). In theory, this it to make the photo appear more like what the scene would look like in person – the human eye has a high dynamic range, which means it can see detail in a wide range of intensity levels, whereas film, and now digital sensors, can only detect detail in a narrow range of intensities. By combining a regular exposure with an underexposure (which captures detail in the light areas) and an overexposure (which captures detail in the dark areas), the resulting photo will have much more dynamic range than a single exposure, which (in theory) makes the photo look more “realistic.” The problem is that most HDR photos end up looking like this:

Or this:

Namely, heavily over-processed, fake-o photoshop jobs rather than actual photos, nevermind how far off the mark they are in terms of making the scene more “realistic.” For some reason this is technique is taking over the internet photography world: Flickr is overrun with HDR pools, sites that used to be cool like Pizdaus and Photo.net are 40% HDR, even deviantART is crawling with HDR. With all the hype over post-processing, people are forgetting what it’s like to look through a viewfinder and see. It’s how you see that makes a good photo.

Tilt and shift photography has been around for a long time. (So has HDR as a matter of fact.) Tilt and shift photography has typically been used as a way of correcting perspective on photos where the camera angle is restricted, such as in architectural photography, in order to make lines parallel. For example, a photo of a high-rise building taken from the ground will end up with the sides of the building converging toward the top of the photo. By shifting the lens in relation to the film plane, the edges of the building can be brought back into parallel. Tilt and shift lenses typically look like something this:

Some photographers use tilt-shift lenses to restrict the depth of field of photos taken at infinity to a strip across the middle of the frame, which produces cool (albeit gimmicky) miniature-looking pictures like this:

This was taken by a guy named Olivo Barbieri, as part of a set that cascaded through the blogosphere and initiated a resurgence of interest in tilt-shift photography among online photographers. Unfortunately, cheap-ass photoshoppers got a hold of the idea and decided to take the low road and post-process tilt-shift effects into normal photos. So now we have photos like this:

Where low-rent snapshotters take their rejected photos and add cheesy effects and borders in order to make them more “artistic.” Jeff Croft, yet another Flickr member to fall victim to this craze, admits, “This is far from a great picture, but it’s exactly the kind of picture that lends itself best to this technique.” Once again, if you learn to see what’s going on in your viewfinder, you won’t need to post-process in order to give your work some kind of aesthetic merit.

Tragedy and Triumph at Fraser Highway and 176th

A couple of things. First, I have to remind everyone to check out the following websites, because they're super awesome. The False is my drawing and illustration blog, which hasn't been updated much recently because I don't have a scanner, and it hasn't been convenient to cart my drawings to school to use the library scanners. Stay tuned though, because it's bound to take off any day now. A Great Sausage is my photo blog. It's cool. I tend to update it much more often; hopefully soon I can get it up to once a day.

Second, I went out to the meadow just up the street a couple days ago to test out my pinhole camera. Up until maybe a year ago it was a farm with sheep and  horses on it, but apparently when the owner was approached by the development company he took their offer without any hesitation, and he's probably living in some overpriced Yaletown loft as we speak. When I went out on Saturday, the surveyors had staked everything out, but it was still a nice meadow with some small groves of deciduous trees (one had a kite caught in it), a road lined with Morning Glories and blackberry bushes, birds and rabbits darting an weaving through the bushes, and an old outhouse, apparently the last remnant of the homestead that used to be on the land, labelled “girls only.” There was no male counterpart. I started a new roll of film today and headed out to the meadow again, only to discover that the entire piece of land had been gutted. All the grass and brush was flattened or dug up, and the groves of trees were now sitting in gigantic piles of detritus, mixed in with old bags and plastic oil bottles and scrap two-by-fours. Down at the bottom of the glen, where there used to be a field of lupine alive with white butterflies, there was only a mud pit partially filled in with water. Bummer. I took some pictures, some of which may turn out okay, but regrettably I discovered that I had forgotten to set the ISO on my digital camera, which I was using as a light meter, so all the pinhole photos I took on Saturday will probably be overexposed.

Third, as you may be able to tell from The False or my Facebook page, I'm reading Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth right now. While I'd give it mixed reviews so far (if that was even possible), she made a fascinating point about how the (largely) fake technical jargon that's attached to most beauty products and diet-oriented foods and weight-loss products nowadays eerily mirrors the tendency of the Establishment to exclude women from “higher” intellectual realms, especially the natural sciences. Similarly, it's been on my mind lately how Lysol products make claims about how many bacteria there are per square inch of your toilet, and how gross that is, while eliding the well-established facts that there are often much more bacteria on places like your skin (50 to 500 million per square inch), and that bacteria are a part of being a healthy, that “dirty” environments are necessary for developing children's immune systems, and that indiscriminate use of household antimicrobial products is probably contributing to antibiotic resistant bacteria. (And let's leave the “not all bugs need drugs” campaign for another day.) Is it just a coincidence that this kind of marketing strategy for household products is similar to the marketing strategies of beauty products in that they exclude women from the knowledge of the natural sciences?

Lens is more

I finished my pinhole camera today. I made it out of an old Pentax body I bought from Kerrisdale for cheap, plus a body cap with a hole drilled in it.

I poked a hole in a piece of aluminum can and taped it to the inside of the body cap so that the hole in the cap lined up with the pinhole.

Here's the lens. It clocked in at f/163.

I had done some previous experimentation with the pinhole before I bought the body cap:


All the dust is from the crappy scanner at SFU downtown. There are a couple more you can check out here. As you can see, I had some problems with exposure and sharpness, so I updated the new pinhole so that the aperture was the optimal diameter for my focal length. Apparently if the aperture is too small, the image starts getting less sharp because of refraction. Who knew?

As a side note, I'd like to thank Kate Beaton. I've never met her, but I was browsing through her hilarious comic strips when I was divinely inspired to open a Livejournal account.