An experiment with design fundamentals that worked

[elfs]

In the absence of any formal plan, I've been doing random exercises from Jim Krause's excellent textbook, Design Basics, and in an exercise on composition he recommends finding magazine photos of landscapes with horizon lines and, with black sheets of paper, cropping the top and bottom of the photograph at various heights to change where the horizon line is with respect to the eye.

Being both lazy and geeky, I instead went to Flickr and found a half-dozen photos tagged with the word "landscape." My main criteria was that I wanted ones where the horizon line was dead center of the photograph. I then called up the photographs in GIMP and cropped them the easy way: by reducing the vertical window and enabling the scroll bar.

Out of six photos, five were improved by a radical crop in one direction or another. The one that did not improve was a street scene where the building blocked a lot of the sky, but even that benefited from a slight crop in one direction or another, moving the horizon line away from the mid-line. The general rule that the center of a photograph is the most boring place to put anything held true even for the gorgeous landscape photos some people put up on flickr.

Comments

Hmm

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

My feeling is that the problem with centering objects isn't just that it can be boring. It's also indecisive and creates an undesirable tension in the image. In a landscape, a vertically centered horizon line begs the question of which is more important-- the sky, the ground, or the horizon itself? The open question may create some dissatisfaction in the viewer's mind even if it isn't consciously noticed.

Centering a subject in the frame suggests that the subject is the only important thing in the image, but perhaps in some sense the mind doesn't want to be told that the background should be ignored. I think the background is part of this interpretive process because if you black out the background, putting the subject anywhere but in the exact center of the image creates the impression that something is missing.

. png

[ladyerin.livejournal.com]

I've been told that thirds are how you should divide your photo. With certain shots the your eye should be drawn away from the exact center of the photo.

I am probably not explaining this well, but you probably noticed it when you moved the focus point (subject) of the photo while you were cropping. It makes the photo more interesting and has less of a 'snapshot' feel.

~E
...I really don't explain art concepts well, do I...

[acelightning.livejournal.com]