> Many years ago, someone told me that brown belts make better karate > instructors than black belts because the brown belts still remember and can > still describe what they do. For the black belts, on the other hand, the > techniques have become instinctive, and the beginners' details now seem hard > to explain, since they've been absorbed into "muscle memory". > > The black belts see the bigger picture, the goal of winning the bout, and > don't need to think consciously about their stance, etc. In the same way, > experienced, skilled, photographers know what "looks right", and don't need > to think about beginners' guidelines anymore. Does anyone else see it this > way?
Pat, Bob B. makes much the same point in his post about shooting. It's a valid point. I just think that when you're talking about "rules of composition," you're talking about standardized ways of arranging subject-matter when you shoot a picture. These rules, being generalized, have to be broad. Thus they are things like "the eye must have a way into the picture, so don't cut off the foreground," or "place objects one-third from one border and two-thirds from the other," and "focus on the front eye" and "don't cut peoples' heads off" and "blur out confusing backgrounds" and Lordy, I don't know what-all. The fact is, nobody can possibly name a single "rule of thumb" a) such that it will usefully improve pictures in all situations where it can be applied and b) such that pictures which do not conform to the rule will not be strong or successful or good or whatever positive word you want to use. Furthermore, I personally contend that reflexively applying any such "rules of thumb" is just as likely to blind the photographer to recognizing other possibilities. The last time in even semi-serious photography that rules of composition were taken seriously were in the "serious amateur" journals of the 1930s and 1940s. "Compositional guidelines" were much beloved of writers for these journals and "posing guides" were actually sold for money. An example I have in front of me right now, _The American Annual of Photography 1935_, published by American Photographic Publishing Company of Boston, features nicely-made photographs and a few that retain some small interest, in some cases incidentally. Most are pictorialist, stiff, posed, pretty, hackneyed, careful, trite, or superficial. Apart from Leonard Misonne, I don't immediately notice any names of photographers I know or that we still look at today--although sometimes one will indeed come across a famous name in one of these old journals. For the most part, this vein was mined thoroughly by the 1950s and most photographers began to see that far more photographic possibilities existed where the standardized approaches were done away with entirely and a sense of freedom and discovery were substituted. This freedom is simply taken for granted today; no photograph is necessarily dismissed because it isn't pretty or posed, standardized in some way, or explicable in terms of a set of guidelines. I'm not saying it's _wrong_ for anybody to make nice pretty pictures. My position is that photography belongs to no one, no one has the right to tell others what to do or not do, and, as long as it's not immoral or destructive or illegal, anybody can photograph anything they want to however they please. If anybody wants to make a list of rules and figure out eight things they'll allow themselves to photograph, well, it's not for me to tell 'em not to. They can knock themselves out. But I most definitely do _not_ think that good photographers are merely "unconsciously" or "instinctively" following all of these rules. Quite the contrary: I think that the rules themselves are deleterious to good work, and that each situation ought to be approached in any way you can devise or invent to try to make it new or unique or interesting or just pleasing to yourself. The challenge is not to make something pretty according to a set of rules; the challenge is to do something that is somehow distinctive to your own tastes or concerns and does _not_ look like eighty thousand pictures of the same thing already made by others. Just my $.02; like I say, I don't own photography and if somebody wants to do the exact opposite of what I suggest, they've got a perfect right. --Mike
