ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at motivation and the psychology of photography and investigates the difference between a snapshot and a formally composed image. It also looks at some of the fine-art concepts that continue to be applied to photography and discusses which are and which aren’t relevant. Composition is a structured process, but, with familiarity, it becomes fluid and unconscious in its application. It needs emotion to feed on – without emotion it can create superficially pleasing, but meaningless images. Often, photographers have borrowed ideas from the fine arts and struggled to apply rules of composition that were, for them, only of use after the fact as a tool to analyse the finished image rather than create it. Precise geometry can be used to place key components. Much of this process comes from an awareness of classical proportion and the embedding of basic shapes, such as triangles and circles, into the composition.
