ABSTRACT
Point of view also affects the composition of the photograph. Composition refers to how a photographer arranges, or composes, visual elements within an image frame. A good composition stimulates eye movement that purposely
directs a viewer’s eye to one part of the image, and from one part of the image to another. A professional photographer using a 35mm camera can intuitively place the viewfinder of his camera around the visual elements in a scene for the best composition. A professional studio photographer has time to compose the elements before looking through the viewfinder. This composition underlies aesthetics of an image. (See chapter 11 for guidelines about composition with different media within a frame.)
Many of the aesthetic choices a photographer makes are guided by nonconscious motivations. Further, the image goes through another level of control after it is created: cropping, editing, placement with type or in a layout, literal and symbolic framing, publication, exhibition, dissemination. Finally, once an image is presented to a viewer, the image is interpreted from the viewer’s own perspectives, using both rational and intuitive processes. This suggests that photography is a medium in which the rational and intuitive processes are equally significant to the production and interpretation of a compelling and revealing image. Any image is both a representation of something ”out there“ in the real world and a revelation of the maker’s conscious and nonconscious motivations, or that individual’s ”interior world.”
