tommystrat wrote:
Thanks for taking the time to post these - most valuable information!
I'm currently trying to find methods to 'up my game' Which has led me towards a basic appreciation of Art something I am learning as an adult.
It seems my schooling let me down in Art as well as English, I was never taught to write, i was expected to get by with intuition.
It's interesting learning the difference between classical and romantic art. There is more energy and movement in the romantic school which appeals for photography (who doesn't want to produce photos with life and energy) and also more distortion, which makes it harder to use as a photographer. Both schools do use similar design frameworks, if its well ordered and passive it tends to be classical, nothing wrong with serenity it's a good feeling.
The fibonacci sequence which lies behind the 1:√φ (root phi) rectangle and the nautilus shell. This is fundamental to the growth of life. When ancient man kept finding this ratio within his environment in so many living things, he must have thought this is no coincidence and believed he had found the evidence of a god or intelligent creator. Leading it to be known as the divine ratio. It is a pattern an ordering of things and the human mind likes order and pattern. When men and women design objects they don't do so randomly if they are not using φ they are not designing religiously
You may notice it's widely used in historical art.
There are lots of other patterns that can be used such as the √2 rectangle the √3 √4 √5 too. There are names such as the baroque / and the sinister \ (take a rectangle draw a diagonal from the bottom left to the top right and that's baroque, bottom right to top left is sinister).
There are reciprocal diagonals that run from corners and cross the baroque and sinister at 90 degrees. where these lines hit the edge is a good place for a perpendicular vertical. You can use these lines to align elements in your composition. These rectangles can be subdivided and create other rectangles with the same proportions and angles.
It may seem like coincidence that things are placed where they are in paintings or repeating diagonals and the use of curves 'the arabesque' to take you through the scene, it is intentional. Actually Coincidence has a specific meaning in art where different objects can share orientations and locations. We tend to think of coincidence as a random occurrence but artists do this intentionally, at least some of the time.
I've always looked at art as what you see in the finished painting, turns out artists are more concerned with the structure underneath, the order that the artist has used. The best art isn't random, it is designed.
If you have ever felt a little ocd because something was out of place that's just your brain looking for order in random elements...
Artists have a useful trick for tonality the greatest contrast is for the subject or the foreground as you go towards a middle ground the contrast reduces and at the furthest distance has least contrast at all. This helps our mind see depth in 2 dimensions.
Twentieth century art has moved away from this order and now it's 'intuition', but we still seek order, musicians have an order when they play, we mentally cringe when they hit a bum note. So even with intuition we are trying to create order and pattern. A favourite thing for artists is to place a leading eye on the centreline of an image which leads to an impression of the subject looking back at you as you view from different angles (this one we can use in photography easily as we have control of the frame.)
Which kind of leads on to the problem photographers have, that artists are free from. An artist can choose where to place things in their design. They can distort to suit their purpose and the romantics can do so upto the point of being grotesque. Being naive I had tended to think they were just poorly drawn, but it's more about creating energy and movement in an image that can't move. Artists get to use a rhythm of light dark light dark across their images. they get to place a dark subject on a light background and a light subject on a dark background. They avoid overlap. E.g It's really quite hard to photograph a duck compared to a swan because ducks tend to blend in with the background.
I should have mentioned Gamut, we tend to think of color space as photographers but for artists it's more about limiting the angles and planes within an image less is more and too much is chaos.
The problem we have as photographers is we are quite limited in what we can do with the world. Henri Cartier-Bresson talked about the decisive moment. But what is that? I hope that what i have written so far makes that easy, simply for the elements of your composition to come together and form a design, an order. To ensure your subject isn't overlapping separated from the background. Most of what we see is chaotic without much in the way of order, this makes taking good photographs really difficult and for most of us we don't have training and the world is unwilling to cooperate, mostly.
Henri Cartier Bresson also said he hoped we wouldn't have armatures (grids) engraved on our viewfinders, unfortunately the rule of thirds grid is fairly common now but it may not be appropriate. There are other grids we can use but I can't imagine using design easily in the viewfinder but we might recognise when elements are coming together to make a great photo.
I hope this is of some interest, I also hope I can manage to make use of this myself, it's a lot to take on board. Martine Franck might be a good example of a photographer who used principles of art design in her photography. I hope I have understood. Please bare in mind I started this research in complete ignorance of Art and i'm barely further forward now. Is it too much to hope better educated people can point out my errors and misunderstanding.
I will include a pdf file in this post it has a page of links that will better explain what i have been trying to explain.