Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

Obsessing as I am about composition at the moment, I thought it a good idea to write a few of my ideas down, hoping that I can bash them into some sort of logical submission.

It was David Ward’s epic post about originality that started my current thoughts. The general background was the phenomenon whereby many photographers visit places they have seen in photographs before and take the same view or visit the seaside at sunset and construct very similar photographs that they have seen in magazines. It made me wonder whether there was something subconcious and/or unintentional happening. I had a feeling that it could be to do with how we ‘interpret’ a scene in relation to our previous experience and our preprogrammed understanding of the world. i.e. Most people only interpret the view that they have in front of them, very few people actually see it.’tree, stream, mountain, grass’ combined with some emotive terms such as ‘stark tree’,’fiery grass’, etc.

Let me explain what I mean by “interpret”. Given a view of the classic dead tree on Rannoch Moor, most people will survey the scene and their subconcious will filter the visual input and pass the following information on to the brain

.. tree .. pointy hill .. rocky stream .. boggy grass .. etc.

The problem with interpretations is that they are informed by our history and our culture and they are so strong that they overpower the actual scene we were looking at. In my post I made a comparison with how we read words on a page. Firstly, we don’t look at letters much; when we read a sentence, we look at word shapes made by ascenders (flk), descenders (jgy), the holes that o’s, e’s and d’s for, etc… and ‘guess’ what the word is. We also don’t actually look at every word if we can guess what the rest of the sentence says. So given a paragraph in a book, we scan these shapes and use our pattern recognition skills to get at the core information.

So what happens when we do actually read a word. I imagine most of us have looked at a word for long enough to start doubting its spelling or even it’s meaning at some point. When we really look at a word for some time, our interpretation mechanism becomes suppressed and we start to see the individual letters and pairs of letters. The problem is, we probably have never done this before (not for a long time anyway) and so the word looks ‘new’. We have a cognitive dissonance between the fact that we know the word very well combined with the fact we are really seeing it for the first time.

This disabling of the ‘interpretive’ part of our brains is an important part of our artistic abilities. To give you an idea how important, you need to read some old books on art appreciation and how artists have gradually moved along a path from symbolic representation. Well I’ve done it for you to save you a little time. The key section that made me really click was in Pliny’s history of art where he recognises Nicias as the first person to paint light and shade Chairascuro) which means that before this point, no-one had conciously realised that a solid had different brightnesses when exposed to light. It’s difficult for us to understand that people did not interpret vision in the same way that we do now. They literally could not see the view in front of them, they were only able to interpret it. When they saw a view or person, their brain processed the view and decomposed it into it’s constituent parts and then they drew their artwork from these parts. Some of the techniques we learn in drawing as children would be revelations to our ancestors. Of course it could be that these acient ancestors knew all about shade and light, perspective and foreshortening but just chose to ignore them all as part of their own ‘personal visions’ 😉

How is this relevent to photography? Well we’re lucky that our cameras do the drawing for us so all we have to do is see the opportunity and realise it. The problem is that we still need to see the opportunity ourselves but how can we do this if we can’t ‘see’ the wood for the trees (It might just be possible that the reason people take so many photographs with digital cameras is that they are not able to see the result until after it has been taken? They are effectively shooting partly blind)

However, just like when we look at a word for too long it stops being a symbol and you start to see the letters and shapes of the letters, when we are out in the field for a long time, we gradually stop seeing the symbols – sun, rock pool, sand, reflection – and will hopefully start to see the real projected space of things and the real colour, like how the sand shifts colour in the shadows and how the curves of two pools meet each other.

A few friends, including Jason Theaker and Rob Hudson, have pointed out that when they are ‘in the zone’ taking photographs, it is akin to a form of meditation. This is something I have also felt, not every time but when I do get the feeling I start to see opportunity everywhere. It’s like the world was some unfathomable whole and gradually the puzzle parts become clear and the solutions available (even if not manageable). This ‘opening’ of your perception is a state of mind that should be our goal. Marcel Proust said “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” and it is these new eyes that we can unveil by looking harder or more importantly, “looking without thinking”. Another great quote from English Writer G.K. Chesterton “If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it for the 1000th time, you are in danger of seeing it for the first time.”.

This state, sometimes called mindfulness, is fairly well known and there is book called ‘The Tao of Photography’ that, judging by the first chapters which you can read on google books, will make for an interesting read on the subject. Although it only talks about Mindfulness in a couple of places, the whole concept is very much oriented around the Zen practise of just ‘being’, just ‘looking. (seeking mindfulness however is not mindful – damn!).

So what we, as photographers, do when we are in this altered state is to capture a view of our environment that the general viewer would overlook. If we can overcome our initial gestalt perceptions, we bring a new way of seeing to our audience.

However, we can also use our new found knowledge of how perception works to create better works of art. There are various perceptive capabilities that our eyes/brain have that allow us to infer extra information from the view in front of us. Most of these capabilities are to do with making decisions on insufficient information – for instance, we will infer the remainder of a shape where only it’s edge is showing (obvious survival benefits here – human: “ooh is that a bear behind that tree!”, bear: “gestalt, schmestalt!… dang”). I hope to expand on how you may use knowledge of your viewers perceptive abilities to create better compositions over the next couple of weeks. For now, I’ll leave you with an interesting observation about leading lines in photography.

When viewers ‘scan’ our pictures, they do not do so in a linear fashion i.e. their eye does not follow a linear path across a picture, absorbing content as it goes. Instead, our eye jumps in small movements called ‘saccades’ and then rest for a moment if there is something ‘interesting’. The resting points are called ‘fixations’. It turns out that our eyes ‘cannot’ smoothly scan from one part of a picture to another. However, if there is a line feature in our picture, it gives our eye a continuous progression of fixation points to follow and, subconciously, our eye prefers to follow this than to skip onto another ‘unknown’ part of the picture. Also, when your eye is in its ‘saccade’ state, your visual system is suppresed (although not completely shut down) so that you don’t really ‘see’ anything in between fixations.

Another perceptual nuance is our ability to ‘fill in the blanks’ (Gestalt Theory’ law of continuity) when we see a broken shape or line e.g. if we were to see a partial or broken line, our brain creates virtual ‘filler material’ where the gaps are to produce a full shape, also strongly preferring primary shapes, lines, circles, triangles…

Combining these two perceptual features together, we can start to understand just what leading lines in pictures are doing. The core ‘sharp’ focus are, our fovea, only covers a couple of degrees and saccades can typicalluy cover about 15-20 degrees but typically only traverse about 4 degrees. So our eye either takes a big jump across a section of the picture, not seeing anything in between (Try viewing this video and try really hard to count the number of ball passes.. once you have done so, click here), or they can follow a line in the picture (real or gestalt) and absorb the features along that path. When our eye gets to the end of a line, it has to ‘jump’ somewhere, either back to something it saw on the line previously or possible to an area of high contrast or interest – remember that your eye does not see detail outside of the fovea so unless you have some strong feature in your picture, your eye/brain won’t have anything to be attracted to.

So we can now explain leading lines, strong fixation points; we can even assume that those ‘dead’ areas people talk about in critiqueing pictures are where the eye can’t gets to via a leading line and that have no strong feature to trigger a large saccade to.

Obviously we wouldn’t want to be thinking about all of this as we are looking for pictures, but it may be useful to bear this in mind when we are doing our final checks. You should try to see the picture as if for the first time and follow the suggested lines. Do they lead out of the picture or do they keep the flow of the eye moving within? When a line ends, is there anywhere for the eye to go? Does your eye get caught in one part of the picture?

The subject of perception and art is one that is fascinating and slightlty scary. As much as I want to know more about how the eye works, I really don’t want to ‘pollute’ my mindful eye. All of this is interesting knowledge and is of some use when critiqueing pictures but our ultimate goal should be to allow these concious thoughts about composition and balance to become part of our subconcious, allowing our own impulses to mingle with our compositional skills to create somethig uniquely personal.