It's All in Your Head

Literally.

To understand the ingredients that might go into making a great photo, it might help to think a little about how an image — nothing more, initially, than a spatial arrangement of colors and intensities — is perceived by stages in the human brain. For when an image first falls upon our retinas, it's nothing more than a mass of disparate signals from our photoreceptor cells: "Lots of green here!", "I got some blue!", "Whoa, that's a lotta red..." There's nothing in that initial data that says this green is related to that green; certainly nothing that says those two greens are, say, part of a blade of grass; and most definitely nothing indicating that that blade of grass is sun-dappled and that that should make us happy! That stuff all comes later.

The Stages of Perception

To perceive an image, the brain (verrrry broadly) needs to do three types of task, each building upon the one before:

1. Identify the structural features within the image — the lines and shapes, their colors and brightness;

2. Interpret these structural features as symbolic representations of things in the world around us — hills draped in shimmering grasses, a golden sun, a path basking in evening blue leading off into a valley; and, then, if it's so inclined,

3. Assemble these pieces within our imaginations — think about what might have come before or follow after, ponder the philosophical questions a certain juxtaposition of symbols might raise.

Emotional Feedback

This process doesn't happen within some isolated black box that simply spits out a number upon completion. Our visual systems provide feedback at each stage of the process in the form of subconscious emotions or nagging demands for our attention. Ever wonder why you like some abstract artworks and not others? In part, it’s that your brain is sending you subliminal messages even about things as simple as “I like that arrangement of lines”, “those colors make me a little nauseous when they're next to one another”, etc. A big part of becoming a better photographer, a more holistic visual image maker, is learning to consciously pay attention to your brain's own subconscious responses to an image at the different stages of perception.

The ingredients of an Image

Based on these stages of perception, then, perhaps we can begin to think about the different layers that might go into building a successful image, or the different aspects, or “lenses”, through which it might be viewed:

• I) Technical: The technical skills required to support the process of bringing one's vision to concrete realization;

• II) Abstract Composition: The structure of an image from the perspective of nothing more than the lines, shapes, and colors of which it is composed;

• III) Subject Matter/Perspective: The objects these abstract compositional features symbolically represent—a closeup of a puppy’s face, a flower backlit against the sky;

• IV) Story: How these subjects and perspectives come together to provide context, tell a story, pose a question, or spark the imagination; and

• V) Integration: The ways in which these different ingredients — these perspectives on an image — work together to strengthen one another.

Discussion

Ingredients

Photographic Genres

Not all of these layers are necessary for a good image. In fact, different genres of photography often put more weight on some than others (though a healthy dose of the last will improve all). A good landscape image, for example, might focus most heavily on technical details (I), composition (II), and the subject (III); while a photojournalistic image might place the story (IV) as the top priority.

is the subject interesting, important, enlightening

explain integration, how one layer can effect another