[stewart_photo]

I don't remember saying anything about accepting everything. Instead, I simply said there is little reason for endless questions why when the answer doesn't likely exist and it wouldn't change anything even if if it did. This thread has been going on for two days now, and is not a bit closer to an answer than when all this started. I suspect I'll be able to say that tomorrow, the next day, and the next. However, not wanting to spoil the fun, I'll walk away from this discussion now - which is probably what I should have done before posting the very first reply two days ago.

stewart

[PDL]

The ROT, Golden spiral, Golden Ratio etc. are rules used to guide composition. They were in use by the Greeks and to some extent the Romans, Arabs, Egyptians, Chinese and other early centers of civilization and art throughout the world. The codification, if you will, was demonstrated in the west during the renaissance. Just look at the art produced during the late Roman and Byzantine – really ugly when compared to the stuff coming out of India, China, Japan, Africa and Arabia.

Just look at the Taj Mahal - rules of symmetry all over the place - especially since what we see now is not all that was visible when it was created. Look at Ankor Wat - lots of symmetry there too - lots of ROT if you take the time to look for it.

As for why ROT - could be that threes are hardwired into our (human) circuitry.
That said - I am convinced that in order to "break" the rules, you really need to understand the rules. Put the object of “interest” in the center of the frame – and what you have is a boring shot, move it off to the side a little – make the viewer work a bit and the image is “improved”. There are instances where dead center works, but look at the ROT – I bet there are areas of interest located along the lines that make up the ROT not just the intersections.

I agree with Stuart that an attempt to get to "the" answer is futile (although we all know that the answer is -- 42 -- we just do not know how to correctly articulate the question), to default to religious texts is also futile - which text is right? Bible, Torah, Quran, Sanskrit writings, Confucius, Hindu texts or is it when the Raven, Coyote, Salmon, Dog, Killer Whale, Bear, Eagle, Hawk or ancestor whispers in your ear, speaks to you in the wind or shows up while you are in your stupor.

I think the interesting part is that the ROT and other concepts of composition tend to be universal to this planets existence. Take threes for instance. Head, Thorax, Abdomen - the components of insects which far outnumber us puny humans and other mammals. How about ISO, shutter speed and aperture, now there is a triad to draw too. Mother, Father -=> child, another triad. Why this three? Then you break the rules (biologically speaking) male - female. Two not three; bilateral symmetry in a large number of animals (two arms, two legs, two eyes, 2 legs, 4 legs, 6 legs, 8 arms/legs - then millipedes’ and centipedes’) we do live in a interesting universe.

Oh - how about electrons, protons, neutrons - three again - the fundamental components of everything. Threes - it is all about the threes - Let the philosophy run free.

The Elitist - formerly known as PDL
PS: do not drink the Kool-Aid of "it's too hard - so let's not talk about it" and the comment about rules are meant to be broken – how droll.

[d.bradley]

Ah HA!!! Now we're geting somewhere!

Movies like "Pi" (sorry,I don't have the symbol) and 23 with Jim Carrey were interesting treatments of the subject of numerology. Pi was quite disturibing in its own right.

I've started wondering about the Fibonacci sequence...Pascal's Triangle (3 sides!), Euclidean geometry...I have some reading to do this weekend!

For this interested in some history, see the wiki on the golden ratio. Looks like those of you who mentioned Da Vinci were spot on. About half way down it shows what I was talking about in my original post, that the human face does follow the rule of thirds when only looking at the 'communicative' part of the visage.

I was thinking too about how else things could be hard wired into the visual part of our brain. PDL you mentioned that a subject in the centre of a frame is often boring, and that got me to thinking about why things outside our heavily 'centrally weighted' tunnel vision are perceived.

Visually, we do 'zoom in' on things and have a great deal of focus on the central part of our vision. This is why people often clash when the subject of a 'normal' lens comes up, about how it 'reflects the standard human FOV' and such. Our field of vision is really complicated. If you see an eagle a few kilometers away in the sky, you focus your attention on it and can make out some pretty small details. But think about it...when you throw, say, a 200mm or 300mm lens on a camera and take a shot, it isn't a magical magnifying glass that has necessarily captured more than you were perceiving without the lens. Similarly, if you sit back and try and take in a mountain vista, sometimes that wide lens doesn't quite capture it all.

But I digress. What I was getting at is that our peripheral vision has been developed to be sensitive to different things than our central FOV:

"The distinctions between central and peripheral vision are reflected in subtle physiological and anatomical differences in the visual cortex. Different visual areas contribute to the processing of visual information coming from different parts of the visual field, and a complex of visual areas located along the banks of the interhemispheric fissure (a deep groove that separates the two brain hemispheres) has been linked to peripheral vision. It has been suggested that these areas are important for fast reactions to visual stimuli in the periphery, and monitoring body position relative to gravity" - Wikipedia

Okay I know, I'm using wikipedia for my research, but it's quick and I'm not in university anymore

So 'near-peripheral' and mid-peripheral stimulus activate different parts of our brains. They resolve less detail, are less sensitive to colour and shape. But in this part of our vision, we are sensitive to motion, originally to detect predators. This leads me to wonder about why we scan photos the way we do (as mentioned by a previous poster), and how that scanning is actually a process of discovery. As we move our eyes across an image, we stimulate the different parts of our brain. Details and colours are revealed in the central axis, while in our peripheral vision we see things totally differently.

Cool.

[Leaf Fan]

What is this thing you're referring to "the Rule of Thirds"?




































Just kidding, my head is spinning after reading those last two posts. Wow, thanks for the effort guys.

ROT seems to work so I'll stick to it and I really don't care why it works, I'm probably too stupid to understand it even if there was one right answer.

[m8o]

What happened to the last post here? It was fantastic, extremely well informed exhibiting great insight; from a past philosophy teacher (didn't pay attention to your handle). ? If you stumble back here, why did you delete it? It was a great post!

[d.bradley]

Hey m8o you're right...what's up? That was a great post, I was going to base some further research on some of the names that were included. Anyone have it cached? heh..

[GaryML]

What happened to the last post here? It was fantastic, extremely well informed exhibiting great insight; from a past philosophy teacher (didn't pay attention to your handle). ? If you stumble back here, why did you delete it? It was a great post!

That was me. Former Graduate Teaching Fellow at the Univ. of Michigan who spend a number of years in Anglo-American analytic philosophy before I grew tired of a life of poverty and the phony world of academics. So I sold my soul to the Devil in exchange for material comfort. (And like the main character in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poem Faust, I thought I was more clever than the Devil, but the Devil got the better end of the bargain!)

I thought about the post for a while after wrote it and decided to delete it. I thought it was too far off-topic to talk about Plato and Socrates in a photo discussion group. I also thought it may come off as a bit pompous. But since there is some interest, I will try to repeat the main idea here:

You think that's why people debate the meaning of, well, anything? To find THE answer? People have been debating the existence of God for millennia, even though no one will ever know "the" answer. Is there no value in contemplation?

I suggest that there is little difference between contemplating the existence of God and thinking about aesthetic patterns (like ROT) that recur again and again through history, cropping up independently in vastly different cultures.

Are you honestly content with accepting everything without question, that everything "just is"? Forgive me for saying so, but that is really sad...

This is an interesting idea with a long history going back nearly 2000 years. If you read Plato's dialogues (especially the "middle period" ones) they mostly have a theme of the sort: "What is Knowledge," "What is Truth," "What is Beauty," etc. Typically, the character of Socrates will challenge other characters who claim to have some idea of the answer to the question, and Socrates shows that their opinion was based on prejudice or dogma and not on sound reasoning from solid observation or other firm basis. What is important about these works is not the particular answers ultimately provided by Plato, but the method of Socrates in developing a system of critical analysis. There is little difference in the methodology whether the subject is "Truth," "Beauty," or "Knowledge" since they are basically re-phrasing the same question of how humans know anything at all.

As for the answer to this question, my views are much closer to those of the influential 20th Century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein than those of Plato. Actually, Wittgenstein's early work Logische-Philosophische Abhandlung (published in the English translation as "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus") is quite Platonic in the underlying theory (discussing the foundations of mathematical truth). This book was written shortly after World War I. However, later works of Wittgenstein reject the earlier viewpoint and he develops a rather unique approach to philosophical problems. Here's a link to a brief biography and discussion of the ideas (although I think the description of the philosophy is mostly wrong, but then I spent more than a decade of my life thinking about this topic):

Wittgenstein

I would encourage my students to take a critical look at their basic beliefs, and ask why they hold those beliefs and what facts and arguments could support their positions. The sad truth is that few students had the courage to really consider their deepest beliefs and subject them to scrutiny. And I would venture that few people outside of the classroom would even contemplate such an enterprise. So my hat is off to Finn for having suggested it in this forum!

This concludes today's ten minute lecture on philosophy from it's origins to the present, and we now return to our regularly scheduled newsgroup ...

[d.bradley]

Thanks Gary, I appreciate you taking the time to re-write your comments!

Having been finished Undergrad for a year and a half now, I find myself a little starved for intelelctual convseration. I'm also on the road a lot for work, and haven't built up a core group of friends where I live with whom to have philosophical debates.

I took film studies, and was always interested in the philosophical underpinnings of image creation, and the belief systems that are both driven by, and reflected in the images we create...

[benjikan]

Say, do you think that the rule of thirds is often agreeable in photographic viewing because of our brain's heightened sensitivity to facial expressions? Perhaps because we are drawn to the eyes, which are about a third of the way down a person's face, and the mouth, which is about a third the way up from the bottom?

Food for thought.

Don't you mean "Rule of Terds"...Well thats what Steve Jacob told me it was called.

Sorry..Pardon my digression, but I'm feeling rather tipsy...

Ben

[benjikan]

Say, do you think that the rule of thirds is often agreeable in photographic viewing because of our brain's heightened sensitivity to facial expressions? Perhaps because we are drawn to the eyes, which are about a third of the way down a person's face, and the mouth, which is about a third the way up from the bottom?

Food for thought.

And on a serious note...Now, where will I start.

I will start by saying the following: Take that rule and dump it whence it came. Trust your intuition. There are NO rules in this game. You set the rules and you decide what it is that appeals to you. If you go by the "Rules" your images may be perceived as pedestrian, banal, predictable, boring, patronizing, self effacing and lacking in integrity. But if you break the rules (which as far as I know in photography isn't yet considered a crime) you may come up with something novel, unique, innovative, illuminating and paradigm shifting.


So like I said "F--K the Rule of Terds" and try the opposite or better yet, when you see a rule in a classic photo book, say to yourself. Ok it has been done,now I will set the precedent for a new rule. Yes, there are universal laws of esthetics, the modulus by Architect Le Corbusier the Golden spiral, Golden Ratio that have come about by our observations of nature and our universe over time, but being that you are a part of that nature, perhaps you could contribute to its evolution.

Happy Holidays
Ben

[Finn]

Yes, there are universal laws of esthetics, the modulus by Architect Le Corbusier the Golden spiral, Golden Ratio that have come about by our observations of nature and our universe over time, but being that you are a part of that nature, perhaps you could contribute to its evolution.

Well said.

[GaryML]

Thanks Gary, I appreciate you taking the time to re-write your comments!

Having been finished Undergrad for a year and a half now, I find myself a little starved for intelelctual convseration. I'm also on the road a lot for work, and haven't built up a core group of friends where I live with whom to have philosophical debates.

I took film studies, and was always interested in the philosophical underpinnings of image creation, and the belief systems that are both driven by, and reflected in the images we create...

Well, its been 29 years since I was an undergraduate. I do have some friends with whom I can discuss ideas rather than simply work-a-day world obligations, but I do not keep in touch with my philosophy collegues from the old days. One friend of mine left the practice of law (which was my deal with the Devil) and is finishing his Ph.D. dissertation in political science on the topic of the cinema industry and political censorship in the 20th Century. Some interesting stuff there.

The whole topic of aesthetics ("What is Beauty") has been rather neglected in academic philosophy. I've read a few papers with some interesting discussion on the distinction between fiction and non-fiction and the construction of "fictional worlds," but there really isn't a whole lot out there on any kind of objective standard for what make good art "good." Typically these conversations degenerate into a very superficial relativism ("Beauty is what the subject finds pleasant or pleasurable") which does not shed any light on anything. The later Wittgenstein "language-game" approach is geared more towards language meaning and mathematical truth, and is not very helpful on aesthetic analysis. What I'm left with is a rejection of all of the conventional theories, but with no good alternative. The response of Wittgenstein in such situations is to point out that a question with no answer is an ill-formed question. That is all well and good, but I still don't know what makes a good photograph different from a bad photograph. Perhaps I never will.

Hmm. I shall ponder this further.

[TaoMaas]

I will start by saying the following: Take that rule and dump it whence it came. Trust your intuition. There are NO rules in this game. You set the rules and you decide what it is that appeals to you. If you go by the "Rules" your images may be perceived as pedestrian, banal, predictable, boring, patronizing, self effacing and lacking in integrity. But if you break the rules (which as far as I know in photography isn't yet considered a crime) you may come up with something novel, unique, innovative, illuminating and paradigm shifting.

I'm gonna have to respectfully disagree with parts of this. I do agree that there are no rules for photography. Or rather...no compositional rules. I believe that the only rule for photography is that the photo must communicate with it's viewer and there are no rules for how the photo should go about making that communication happen. Anybody can pick up a camera, immediately begin to make photos with no heed towards traditional composition and perhaps create a new, innovative style. But more than likely all we'll really create is gibberish of very little value. Or we may experiment for years only to arrive back at the same "rules of composition" that we should have learned long ago because, after all, it is the universal appeal of those guidelines that made them rules in the first place. So I think the rules do have their place. I just don't think we should be a slave to them.

[amateur6]

I'm gonna have to respectfully disagree with parts of this. [...] more than likely all we'll really create is gibberish of very little value. Or we may experiment for years only to arrive back at the same "rules of composition" that we should have learned long ago because, after all, it is the universal appeal of those guidelines that made them rules in the first place.

I agree. Start with the rules, learn to understand them (which is, after all, what the OP was doing), and breaking them will then be much more productive. Have you ever seen the work that Picasso did before his cubist work? The man was an absolute master (of "traditional" art) before he was 20. He had nowhere else to go, no further challenges, because he was so talented.

Can someone less talented break the rules and still create something of value? Of course, but as TaoMaas says, the odds are against you.

[pschlute]

The instructor at a course I recently attended had this to say about the rule of thirds.

"In order to by a good photographer, you must learn and undestand the premise of the rule of thirds." "However, it is quite alright to break the rule provided you understand it to begin with."

I could not agree more.

As for why ROT - could be that threes are hardwired into our (human) circuitry.

Many well respected people think the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio are, and it extends beyond the boundaries of art:

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