Shifting focus from technical perspective to composition

[MegaHurtz]

I hope the thread title was descriptive enough to explain the question I have. For my whole life, I have been a very technical person. I breezed through college as a computer science major, and I am doing well for myself in a very technical career. I have always thought in terms of technology, and as a result, have never been very artistic. However, I've always wanted to try photography, and have been enjoying my 20D for the several months that I have had it.

However, being that the technical side of my brain dominates so much more over the creative side, I find it very difficult to stimulate the other side of the brain. When I am shooting, I end up focusing on things that I believe are less trivial than the actual shot... exposure, sharpness, quality of equipment, etc. My compositions, which sometimes I am very satisfied with, I believe could improve if I am able to use the right side of my brain more. I find myself typically more worried about the camera settings, than what is actually in the viewfinder.

My question for discussion then, is: For people who are more naturally technical and analytical minded, what do YOU do to try and stimulate your creative side?

[SkipD]

My question for discussion then, is: For people who are more naturally technical and analytical minded, what do YOU do to try and stimulate your creative side?I am very much a technical type of person. I take great care to get my photo images technically as good as it is possible to do so. However, I usually do not use the camera to visualize the shots I want to take. I do it by looking at the situations around me and imagining what I want an image to look like.

One needs to learn about perspective to become visually creative. Perspective is controlled by the distance between you (the or camera) and the subject. Thus, you need to find a place to take your image from that will provide the perspective you would like in the final image.

Before I explain something about choosing focal lengths for a shot, I have to say that so many folks merely use various focal lengths to "get more in the shot" (using a wide-angle lens) or get "more reach" to a particular subject element (using a telephoto lens). Most photographers never really give a second thought to controlling perspective in their images.

Let's assume that you are taking a shot of your family in some tourist town, and there is a mountain range in the background. You can control the relative size of the mountains as compared to the people in the shot by selecting your distance from the family. Here's how: Let's assume that you are presently using a 55mm lens, just for a focal length number to talk about. You have arbitrarily chosen a spot to shoot the family from with the mountains in the background. You are 25 feet from the family. However, the mountains look a bit small in the viewfinder and you would like to double the height of the mountains relative to the family.

To double the relative size of the mountains, you would double the distance between you and the family and you would choose a focal length twice what you had been using. So, backing up to 50 feet and using a 110mm lens would allow you to produce an image with the mountains twice as tall as with the previous position and focal length. This is because adding 25 feet to the distance between you and the mountains is an infinitely small change, but you are using double the focal length. The family, however, would be exactly the same size in both setups because when doubling the distance you doubled the focal length.

You can, of course, do the opposite by getting closer and using a shorter focal length. This might be useful to reduce the impact of the background items in a shot if that's your goal.

[drparker]

Check-out this thread http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=235169 I found it had some great ideas I could try.

[Jim G]

I'm a very technical person and I got the hang of the technical side of photography very quickly - it's totally second nature now and getting a good exposure most of the time is pretty much guaranteed.

Content is not, however.

I started out in live music stuff and candids and that taught me to wait for the right moment.. it didn't teach me to compose people, however. At the moment I'm trying to come to grips with organising people for portraits and I'm finding that I don't really visualise the shot before I take it - I'm much more used to waiting to see what happens in front of me and catching the "good" moments. This is causing no end of difficulties.

For me in this matter I've decided to get some magazines/books/printouts of shots that I like, get a model (friend model, not paid in money model) and try to emulate these. To do this I'm going to have to get people to sit in a certain pose and I'm going to have to direct them in this. From here I can modify accordingly to what I think looks good but the key idea is just to get me thinking outside of the box I have been...

Hopefully that'll lead me to thinking a bit more about what I want before I shoot. That's my $.02 on this issue :)

[condyk]

I think you can learn by looking at other shots tho' finding shots that are worth learning from can be very time consuming. Try the links in my Sig. The technical is necessary. Good gear is also necessarily. For me tho' imagination and a good eye has to be first because those are the criteria that determine a technically good shot from an interesting one. You have asked the essential question and I'm not sure what the answer is. I do feel that one can only go so far without that magic of imagination. Of course, with people, you need to be able to engage them too. Complicated eh? ;-)

[kram]

I'm sure someone is going to post one answer and then I can just go ahead and use that ;) Seriously, its been my biggest frustration as my technical skills have improved substantially in the last 1.5 yrs.

The one technique that I try and do is shoot with someone who is clearly artistically superior. And then think at each composition why I did not come up to it. Its a painfully slow learning process.

[Jim G]

One thing that helped me was doing drawing for a number of years before I got into photography... try dabbling a little in other artistic mediums, you may find that opens your mind in new ways :)

[Carzee]

I may be the opposite of your personality and therefore OT. I do watch the numbers and dials but mainly I've been told I'm observant. That doesn't mean I'm a blood-brother to Mr Monk; I'm quirky and "I see things" both before and after (unfortunatelY) they occur. Its annoying and depressing when I realise what I missed, what I didn't see in time to get off a pic. I also shoot as a note-to-self that this idea or whatever could work properly somewhere else at some other time. Eg; handheld grab

http://www.mygraphix.com/index/u/9/195/2301.jpg

Yesterday I sat down and looked for something to shoot at a golf green. There were ducks aplenty incidently. I watched a group of golfers do what they do. I saw a possible shot and awaited the next group to shoot my idea. Sure enough the next group did almost exactly as the earlier group and I was ready to try my shot. No set up or direction, just a 10 second opportunity. Enough time for 2 completely candid shots before the bgd was too close. I set ISO and Av and got the focus point set up before he came into frame. Handheld grab.

http://www.mygraphix.com/index/u/9/233/2559.jpg

[Jon, The Elder]

Our good friend CARZEE just gave 2 very nice examples.

MegaHurtz.....its your mindset ! Remember when you were a kid, before you got all cobbled up with being an adult? No preconceived ideas to block or channel thoughts about a given situation? Take yourself back to those times and live in the freedom it gave us.

I just shot my sisters 85th birthday party. My nephew stepped in front of the camera, I got a great shot of the back of his head. 55 people at the party, had a ball guessing who it was.
Absurd...probably, but it was different.
Try very hard to dispose of conventional thinking, you might be pleasantly surprised.

[DocFrankenstein]

There's so much you can do to develop the art. Being a super geek myself, I do not beleive photography is any different than engineering or CS or even math.

You need a solid foundation before you start shooting assignments. Like in CS you dedicate your time to study different computer languages, algorithmization, database design, math, physics, electricity, web design, information systems, computational complexity, networking, micropocessor systems... etc. Coming out, you've spend four years thinking about computers from different points of view and you have a system. A map of how the whole thing works.

Later, when a client gives you a spec sheet you're able to design the stuff within the budget and on a deadline.

In photography, you need to break up everything the same way. Study elements of design, history of photography, great works and masters, their infulences, history of art in general, take a painting or drawing course, portait lighting, studio lighting, types of light used in different eras, telling a story through pictures, nudes, nature, macro, landscapes, jewelry and product photography, color management, candids, copying works of others, directing the models, post processing effects, flashwork, meters......

The list goes on. If you break it down and approach the whole thing systematically, then you'll build a solid foundation. Once an assignment comes along you'll be able to select the skills you have and produce one kicking image.

[Hawg Hanner]

Excellent subject.

The 'rules' of good composition and aesthetics are commonly written about and they are very good rules to review over and over again in my opinion. But like vkalia implies, there are more subtle aspects to photography and imagery that are not as easily explained. And while the ideas presented in the article above are important, the opposite of each rule may also be true. For example, while use of color can be central to a good photograph, the absense of color can also be useful...while the rule of thirds is important, centering an object in the middle can also be equally powerful. I think the article also forgotten to cover the importance of light (and conversely, the absense of light).

That said, many fine photographers, like people who excel in other professions, also research parallel topics that aid in their photographic efforts (i.e. psychology, architecture, mathematics, etc.). These other topics can also help decide which composition is strongest.

I have only been taking photographs for little over a year and one of the most useful tools for determining what works and what doesn't work is a web site like Flickr, which provides a way for other users to critique and comment on photographs. As photographers we each have a benchmark...if you are a professional photographer and have been shooting for over 10 years you are very likely to be a better photographer than me. And while your photos might be better than many of those posted on Flickr, you can see trends in your shooting styles. In other words, which photographs elicited more comments, which ones were 'favorited' more than your other shots, what do the people like, and which photographs encouraged other members to provide more substantive comments. Flickr is reverse marketing at its finest; it has really helped me hone my composition and photographic skills and it has given me a medium to find work toward better and better photographs.

[ScottE]

My suggestion is that you get some good composition books like Freeman Patterson's "Photography and the Art of Seeing" or "The Art of Photographing in Nature by Martha Hill and Art Wolfe.

The first book is interesting because it deals with a lot of the concepts of composition and what makes a strong image.

The second book is interesting because it has comments on each image by the photographer who explains the technical and compostion effects he was attempting and a magazine photo editor who examines the photo from an artistic and impact viewpoint.

[Chuck Nakell]

At the risk of seeming overly simplistic (or as some unknowing might say, too Minor White-ish), I think it largely comes down to Feeling. Once you have absorbed all the technical aspects of your equipment, and the tehcnical aspects of compostion, you then must throw it all aside and go within on a non-thinking basis. After you empty out the chatter in your mind, and allow feeling to emerge, the shot will appear to you in a way that linear thought would never take you to. Once that occurs, you can bring back all the tehcnical to complete the image. It's a very oppositional process, but most of the time when pure feeling does not preceed cognition... you'll get very nice, boring, detached images. It's hard to let go when the analytic wants to take over, but it is the way of most of the greats, and with good reason. Keith Carter, for example, knows all about his camera, ratios,and processing...but he is an artist first and foremost, and that is where he begins his images.

[akhater]

I hope the thread title was descriptive enough to explain the question I have. For my whole life, I have been a very technical person. I breezed through college as a computer science major, and I am doing well for myself in a very technical career. I have always thought in terms of technology, and as a result, have never been very artistic. However, I've always wanted to try photography, and have been enjoying my 20D for the several months that I have had it.

However, being that the technical side of my brain dominates so much more over the creative side, I find it very difficult to stimulate the other side of the brain. When I am shooting, I end up focusing on things that I believe are less trivial than the actual shot... exposure, sharpness, quality of equipment, etc. My compositions, which sometimes I am very satisfied with, I believe could improve if I am able to use the right side of my brain more. I find myself typically more worried about the camera settings, than what is actually in the viewfinder.

My question for discussion then, is: For people who are more naturally technical and analytical minded, what do YOU do to try and stimulate your creative side?

All I can say is "welcome to the club", I this we, and many others, share the exact same "problem" how do I stimulate my creativity??Unfortunately, I hate to admit it, but I have a rather copycat approach, I look a lot at pictures and try to get close to the stuff I like most. Everytime that I try to do some creative work of my own it ends into a disaster :(other solution ? well yes of course I write technical documents to try to help other photographers that lacks technicalities :):) I find it a good way of using the only thing good I haveCheers