On Friday afternoon one of my teachers invited me in to talk a bit about portrait photography. I had told him that I did a lot of photography and that I’d be happy to pop in at some point, but I hadn’t planned a lesson. And so I shared a few key concepts like the rule of thirds, and moving subjects away from the background to eliminate the look of a mug shot, and gave a few more suggestions.
As I did so, I surprised myself with how much I knew as a result of years of doing wedding photography. Except that when I did weddings, I did them on film. I didn’t have the instant feedback of seeing a photo right after I took it. I wasn’t sure that I got the shot that I wanted. It was a lot more challenging to photograph a wedding 25 years ago.
The students had an assignment to replicate a few photos from well known photographers, and so after explaining some key composition rules, I told the that they will probably notice that a number of the photographs they were emulating broke the rules I was sharing. I told them that the reason good photographers could break the rules is because they understand them extremely well. “You need to know the rules in order to break them and still get a good shot.”
To explain this further, I shared some artwork rather than a photograph. I showed the Picasso’s bull.
I described how Picasso truly understood art, and that for him to draw a bull and give the full essence of it with just a handful of lines, he had to understand and appreciate what else he saw and understood about the essence of his subject. And he had to know his craft well, to be able to see what was needed to represent the minimalist view.
Most new photographers are better off sticking to the rules and paying attention to them until they really understand them. Only then can the break the rules well and still take a good photo. I also talked a bit about the uncanny valley in photography. For example, if you are taking a photo and the horizon is off of horizontal by 3-4 degrees, then the photo looks awful. We know it’s crooked. But take that same photo and tilt it over 30 degrees to focus on something in the foreground and the photo can work.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but when it comes to photography, and the composition of a good shot, there are certain rules that make a shot aesthetically pleasing. Unless you really understand these rules it’s not easy to break them and still pull off a great shot.
I think this rule about breaking rules applies to a lot more than just photography.
