In case you have noticed, I added an Amazon widget on my blog. It contains and will only contain books that I own and have read (for the most part – some don’t lend themselves to straight reads – more like references). The first book I will point out is “The Photographer’s Eye” by Michael Freeman. Its an excellent book on composition and touches on some areas not often discussed – the shape of your image (the frame) for one. Personally I have felt that second to developing an eye for light, is the development of an eye for composition.
Blog image: nice morning shot of Mount Hood on a misty fall morning. Illustrates the compositional technique of layering or repetition.
4 Comments
do you know of any books that explain why humans find certain design elements and combinations of elements appealing? thanks for the recommendation im gonna order it! just finished brenda tharps book which was awesome. looks like this one is the next step for aspiring amateur photographers like me.
Kalani, this book talks about the impact different compositional elements tend to have on the viewer (positive, negative, slow, fast, stability, tension, etc. I think that is what you are looking for. I have Brenda's book as well and it is a good one – but different. If you plan to get the book through Amazon if you use my widget I will get some credit (I am now an "Amazon Associate".
ah cool. ill definitely order through here. least i can do for all the great blogging. i read some sample chapters and im certainly excited to learn more about how to communicate emotions through visual elements but im wondering if anybodys cracked why we react the way we so to what we see. sort of how the gestalts discovered humans are hardwired to interpret certain patterns and geometries one way over any other way. is design appeal evolutionary? cultural? a product of being bombarded by ads designed to sell products since childhood? is there an emotional language humans are born with a vocabulary that includes basic combinations of design elements, if so are "good" designs simply well phrased "sentences" that other humans can understand and interpret? im not sure im being clear but thats the sort of work im interested in reading to help me understand why some images grab me and some dont.
Kalani, I do understand. While I don't know that anyone has cracked the whole way we are wired to respond to images (there is actually a lot of work out there going on to understand how we see amd look at an image). I had the chance to work in the field of color science and psychometrics for a while and I can tell you when it comes to judging color images, the results are the same across cultures. There is also a lot of historical work from the Greeks, the Renisance masters, etc where they learned about human response to compositional elements. The book, The Photographer's Eye does touch on some of that but probably not in the pure cause/effect way you may be looking for.
In the end you are on the right track to ask these questions because when we are talking about design/composition we are talking about communicating.