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Stumped again by basic rules of composition

by | Jun 14, 2013 | Composition, Edward Burtynsky, Perception, Photography, Process, Scale, Visual Field

It’s funny how some learning moments can be instantly locked into your hard drive forever while others will keep smacking you in the face, like Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes.

I look forward to the day when basic rules of composition come naturally, but until then I will continue to waste a lot of time and materials creating visual fields that are uncomfortable, underwhelming and just… wrong, somehow.

Take this photo I took a couple of weeks ago. (Please!) Why do I insist on hacking up the space with a dead-centre subject? I literally can’t see the forest for the trees here. It takes this special kind of inability to reduce this giant 500-year-old living Sitka spruce to just another stump. 

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But the bigger problem here is lack of scale. I may have felt insignificant beside this ancient giant organism, but it sure doesn’t show it. I’d like to blame my basic lack of compositional abilities on my focus on patterns over subjects, but that’s pretty much a cop-out.

Meanwhile, Mr. I Don’t Take The Photos managed to capture all the scale and detail in one take, and was clearly not fixated on including the whole trunk in the view-finder.

Scale can be critical in an art practice. It’s everything to Ontario photographer and artist Edward Burtynsky, who captured China’s massive scale in Manufactured Landscapes (Burtynsky talks about the Canadian landscape inspired him, in this Ted Talk.)

I have to remind myself that scale is not about size, but size differential. This 20-year old table-top spruce bonsai “developed” by a German bonsai master (below) possesses its own tiny might. But here again I’m a little lost. Would including the hand of the grower (stunter?) emphasize the scale or reduce the potency of the image?

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As an exercise, I’ve been wrestling with scale using four-inch acrylic cubes. In this one, a toy airplane gives a mass of orange wool gains scale — and narrative.
Does understanding scale take some innate way of seeing the world, as in Burtynsky’s work? Or is it just about learning to avoid the usual mistakes, like getting sucked into iPhone’s panorama camera feature? 

Or scribbling 18″ instead of 18′ on the back of napkin that resulted in an underwhelming Stonehenge prop: