> > Harald Mante, Photo Design. Picture Composition for Black and White > > Photography, trans. E F Linssen SZS FRES FRPS (New York, Van Nostrand > > Reinhold Company, 1971), 10 > > sounds like an interesting book, but it's a little hard to find (i did > request > an interlibrary loan) — but what's his definition of normal viewing > distance? >
he gives a range for normal *reading* distance of 12-16". This is for reading books. For reading a desktop computer the health & safety, ergonomics people usually talk about 20", or approximately arms-length - you'd have to look at their sites to get a better definition, and possibly also a bell curve. However, I don't know why you need a bell curve - you just have to look around you at a large number of people looking at pictures in every day circumstances - from books, screens, iPads, art galleries, to get an idea, and your experience of seeing many humans should give you some idea how limited their physical variability is - most people's arms are the same length, give or take a few inches; most people stand about the same distance away from pictures in a gallery and sit about the same distance away from their computer screen, give or take a few inches. Of course we can all produce examples of outliers, but they're, er, outliers, so they don't broadly affect this. Mante's claim is that the viewing distance should be twice the diagonal of the picture, ergo the diagonal should be half the viewing distance. Mante studied at the Bauhaus and although he doesn't give specific references for his claims, he does say that his aim is to extend to photography the findings published in the Bauhaus books. B -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
