On Sunday, January 4, 2004, at 07:33 PM, Lodge, Phillips wrote:
The digital revolution - hardware together with processing software - makes it so much easier to repeat all the compositional tricks that I learned in the darkroom many years ago - changing perspectives, composition, colour - we know them all of course, and can now manipulate them without spashing about in the dark.
The best 'digital photographers' (how i hate that term....should be 'photographer', pure and simple!), are people who have taken up digital tools in preference to film. As virtually all these guys/girls have been top end 'smudgers' for decades then digital is nothing but a method to make the image the client asks for, no more and no less. The people I'm talking about grew up using 10" x 8" and learned the whole thing from the ground up. Composition as well.
Also with cameras which can take hundreds of shots at a single loading, and downloaded at effectively zero cost, a more blunderbus approach to capturing images can be pursued.
Well the 'hose pipe' school of photography has never worked in my opinion. Even in film days a motordriven 35mm camera pointed and hosed at a subject will generally produce 36 crap images! Digital is no different. The skills of the person making the image is what matters. What does help with digital is the instant viewing of images, which takes away the 'have i got the shot', 'lets hope the E6 machine does not go pear shaped' etc. BUT the lighting, composing etc is still the same, as is the whole fulfilling the brief etc.
Therefore I feel that the link between composition and digital photography is new and changing.
I'm not sure about composition changing, but I find digital/photoshop has changed the way I work. I'm more inclined to take risks now I can see the result instantly, so find I tend to 'push the envelope' more. In the old days the tendency was to maybe play safe, particularly with commercial jobs on location....i dunno what others feel about this?
I would suggest that at one stage it is necessary to teach composition - especially if one is to produce art commercially. The punters usually have clear ideas about what constitutes good art (and photography?). Their tastes can be very conservative! We cannot always afford to disagree, and at the very least it is nice to be able to predict them.
I was taught composition at college years ago, and I guess the medium does not change the whole gamut of the rule of thirds/golden mean etc. If viewing a painting from the 17c, or an image produced yesterday, the human eye/brain tends to view images in the same way, looking for dynamics/tone/colour etc. What I find interesting is that even photographers I know who never went anywhere a college learned composition 'on the job'. BUT I disagree that learning the rules of composition somehow limits creativity. How an individual composes his/her image is what makes the individual unique.
paul sav
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