One rule only

Red fence (warm), originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Today I started to read a guidebook on painting, "The Simple Secret to Better Painting" written by Greg Albert. On the back cover it is advertised that the book describes a single rule which ensures that your compositions work every time. The rule is "Never make any two intervals the same". I bit simplistic perhaps?

Well, actually the book is quite interesting, as it focuses on what makes a painting (or a photography) interesting. The hypothesis is that there is a region of interesting compositions in the middle of a scale from boring to chaotic.

And there is something there. It appears to me that I have often tried to "balance" my photographs, using symmetry and an even number of elements - when I should have strived towards breaking the similarity, using deliberate means to avoid stable and repetitive elements.

I have only started with the book but already I have several new ideas to test. Making photographs more interesting is definitely something I want to do.

But why it is that some photos which are quite regular and repetitive still have a great visual impact? This is worth thinking about.

This photo is from today. The original had quite cool colors, and made me shiver, so I used the "Sunset scene" operation in Lightzone to tune the photo a bit. Now it is not so shivery any more. What I like is the tilt in the fence - I feel it generates a nice tension in the photo.