All about Composition and your Camera.

All about Composition and your Camera

COMPOSITION

Artists and Photographers

Much too objectively to please human taste. If you do not believe it, have a look at some painter's technique and compare it with a photograph taken from the point where he was working on his canvas. What has he done? First of all, he gave dominance to the real subject of his picture by spending on it his best colours and working into it much more detail than into anything else. Then, he took some liberties with the perspective. His foreground and his background appear less exaggerated. You can still see that things nearer to us seem to be larger than those far away, but his scale of perspective seems to be mellowed down compared with that of the lens.
From a purely scientific point of view, the painter lies and the lens is right. From the point of view of human experience the painter is right and the scientifically working lens wrong. Yet we cannot persuade our lens to be human, we cannot make it abandon the rules of perspective and correct its views according to our taste.
Just as we do not enjoy another privilege of the artist, who is at liberty to select, emphasise or leave out details of his subject as presented by Nature. If he has got four trees and a telegraph pole in the foreground of the landscape which he is going to paint, but thinks that it would be nicer to have three of them only and no telegraph pole at all, well, he just paints four minus one tree and that is that. Even a painter of the most realistic school will not have any scruples about omitting altogether from his picture a lorry standing in the middle of the road, if he does not want it to stand there.
But we cannot move that lorry if it does not happen to belong to us; and will hardly try to cut down even the most unwelcome tree just because if interferes with our pictorial intentions. We may play around with a still-life arrangement, just as a painter does. We may even persuade a sitter to move his/her head in one direction or the other, choose the background and adjust their cloths. But that is the limit.