Originally posted by fredralphfred You're reading too much into my rigid whimsy. I didn't realize there was a school of photography that actually did that. Now I've got some research to do. Was some of that based on the limitations of the equipment, though? Thinking ASA 8 film was fast, 4x5 cameras were compact, and flash bulbs were way safer than flash powder? (OK, OK, I know they had 120 film and TLR's then, but you get the point.)
As I think about it again, that article mentioned something interesting. I'd been thinking of taking some beginning art classes and an art history class to see if I could learn something about composition in the hopes that my photos would actually look like something. But from the blurb you posted, it sounds like that might not produce the desired results.
I don't know if you were able to step back and forth through the pages to read the whole article, but I used to and this out to my photography students when we started discussing composition. Form my perspective, you need to learn and understand the rules of pictorialist composition, often you can incorporate them into an image quite easily and they do give the impression that you've actually composed the image, but you also have to understand when to break them or when they are just completely irrelevant.
For example in images like this I am using the branches to lead your eye to the bird. You follow the lines to get to the subject. That is definitely a pictorialist construct and consciously done. I also cropped so the branch starts in the corner of the image....
But when what you've got is total chaos, that works too...
Rules ar made to be broken. Especially the Pictorialists rules of compositions.
Last edited by normhead; 06-15-2015 at 01:25 PM.