Design Principles for Photography

Jeremy Webb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367717896
• eBook ISBN: 9781000213232
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Photography

In an age over-saturated with photographic imagery, Design Principles for Photography demonstrates how design awareness can add a new level of depth to your images. By adapting and experimenting with the tried and tested techniques used by graphic designers every day, you can add dynamism and impact to your imagery, whatever the style or genre - something that today's editors, curators and publishers are all crying out for.The second edition includes examples of unsuccessful compositions, annotated images highlighting key techniques and an expanded glossary. There's also a new section on movements in photography and their reflection in composition, including modernism, expressionism, and surrealism and interviews with international practitioners discussing how they've included design principles in their work. Featured topics: Basic design theory; the use of space; positional decisions; the elements of design; line; shape or form; space; texture; light; colour; pattern; rhythm; contrast; scale and proportion; abstraction; movement and flow; containment; emphasis and emotion; justaposition; incongruity; mood and emotion.

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Basic design theory

Title: Gallery

Source/photographer: Hannah Starkey

Within this beautifully constructed image, so reliant on straight lines and blocks of different tones, only the plastic cup and the plastic chair stand out as isolated elements within the angular and very graphic study of the space.

At its most basic level, design applied to photography is simply the skilful arrangement of picture information within a frame. Photographers can include or exclude information, emphasize or diminish areas of content and adjust their position by a fraction of a degree if necessary in order to capture the image required.

Design and composition are like two sides of the same coin – design being the process and composition being the outcome. Acknowledging and responding to the role design plays within your photography enables you to create images that can be ‘read’ and understood by the viewer. However, it is crucial that the gaining of this knowledge does not in any way destroy the magic of photography or detract from its power.

Many photographers agree that there is no winning formula or easy route to consistently producing good photographs, if a ‘good’ photograph is held to be one that is clear in its intent and strong in its composition. It’s really a question of juggling with a set of design variables and being able to see what is really there, not what we might expect or assume to be there. Once we can approach a subject with an uncluttered vision and a childlike curiosity, we have the opportunity and the motivation to capture an image with the uniqueness of our own vision and the greatest efficiency required.

The role of the viewfinder in photography

The viewfinder creates a precise boundary between what’s captured and what’s not. Unlike painting, where an image begins with a blank surface, photography can be called a reductive pursuit. It starts out faced with everything and it extracts a minute aspect of that by using the viewfinder edges to consciously or unconsciously create a something by excluding specific elements.

Here, the term ‘reductive’ is not used in a negative sense, but rather it highlights the essence of photographic image capture in the way it is normally practised.

The viewfinder is the greatest compositional tool known to photographers. However, its power to influence our engagement with images is often poorly considered because we are too concerned with subject and centrality rather than imaginatively framing a scene in innovative or extraordinary ways.

After our imagination and our creative expectations, the viewfinder is where we first encounter the design process at its most raw. How the viewfinder frames our intended subject is based on a range of decisions taken by the photographer, the most critical factors behind these decisions being height, angle and distance to subject.

By using the viewfinder consciously and effectively, photographers can create bold and compelling images that frame the world in unusual ways.

The edge

Using the viewfinder’s full capability allows the photographer to consider 100 per cent of the image space available, right up to the edges. As an intentional choice, using the viewfinder edge to visually dismember a subject or cut off something into nothing has both positive and negative consequences. There is no escaping the fact that an image has to have some kind of boundary, but that does not mean we have to take a passive approach to its inevitable restrictions. We must look for opportunities to use it creatively.

Some photographers are acutely aware of the power of the defining edges of the viewfinder; their images creatively play with what is included or excluded from the photograph.

By using the viewfinder consciously and effectively, photographers can create bold and compelling images that frame the world in unusual ways. In addition, they enable the viewer to address a familiar subject matter through a new perspective, while emphasizing and reconfiguring the various design elements into fresh arrangements of greater visual appeal.

Title: Snow wave

Source/photographer: Jeremy Webb

Sometimes nature lays the simplest forms right in front of us. By using your judgement of distance, proximity and viewpoint, you can let the frame take over and bypass all that is unnecessary for an exercise in simplicity.

The frame: whole truths and half truths

Photography can never present the whole truth, but it can shape history because of the notion that photography is bound up with truth. For example, world events have been initiated, recorded and sometimes turned around by the influence of photography in news journalism.

A famous TV advertisement, “Points of View” created for The Guardian newspaper in 1986, depicted the scene of a skinhead walking down a street, before breaking out into a run and heading aggressively towards an older man. The message was clear: here was a menacing and dangerous individual out to rob or beat up a defenceless victim in broad daylight.

As it turns out, the film reveals the man is running towards the older man in order to knock him out of the way of some scaffolding about to fall on him. The carefully controlled filming and framing of the scenes plays to our prejudices and only tells part of the story at first. After a dramatic pause, the full facts of the scenario are revealed and the whole truth is presented. The advertisement shows that the frame can capture part of the scene to create one carefully contrived meaning, while taking an alternative view presents another.

Inclusion vs exclusion

Deciding what you should and shouldn’t include within your frame presents not only moral dilemmas, but also design issues about whether what you include benefits your image or detracts from its overall power.

Ideally, what you frame within your viewfinder should only contain the detail and substance necessary to communicate your vision as powerfully as possible. The greatest photographers get to the heart of something or someone in a way that leaves amateurs envious because they have developed an intuitive ability to get close to their subjects or to use their sense of design (in terms of arranging the elements within the viewfinder) to carefully exclude unwanted detail or to emphasize certain components at the expense of others.

The inclusion of unnecessary or distracting details will allow your audience to miss the point or become troubled by the sheer number of possible interpretations and responses that could arise from a cluttered or busy image.

Title: Pat Sabatine’s 8th Birthday Party, Martins Creek, April 1977

Source/photographer: Larry Fink

Many of Larry Fink’s black and white shots were taken in square format or cropped to fit a square image. By getting really close, his images often make dynamic, energetic moments of social interaction by allowing subject matter to drift to the edges of the frame. Heads and limbs are cut off by the frame edge or are only partially shown in many of his images. But the containment of his unusual angles and high-contrast black and white technique always creates compelling images from social gatherings and family occasions of every kind.

Title: Miss Appleton’s shoes II, 1976

Source/photographer: Olivia Parker

Olivia Parker creates beautiful compositions with her still life images. In this image, the scene is contained by a black border, which is created by the edge of a processed sheet film that also references the photographic nature of her images.

Frame proportions and format

Photographers often adopt very rigid preferences about the proportions of the frames their cameras offer. In turn, this can lead to an equally inflexible approach towards the way we build and construct our frames within a design aesthetic. Our creative vision can become a little stifled as a result of sticking with one frame size and format that we’ve simply become used to using without considering other possibilities.

Image format and proportions are determined by the cameras we use, and whether we shoot 35mm, medium format, large format or even pinhole, the frame proportions our cameras produce allow us to adopt new ways of viewing a subject and framing it, with design at the heart of many of those choices. An image opportunity may require a very different compositional ‘build’ when captured in a square format if the photographer is simply conditioned to view scenes and subjects through the traditionally proportioned rectangular frame.

Square format photography often allows key graphic elements to become visible with a far greater force – diagonal lines can appear more dynamic, simple shapes or areas of space can assert themselves far more powerfully than when contained within the more familiar landscape-format frame. Diane Arbus created many of her portraits of America’s marginalized or dispossessed with her square format Leica; David Bailey often used square format to create many of his iconic portraits of rock stars and actors from the 1960s, often using the top edge of the square frame to cut into the top of his subject’s head. More recently, landscape photographers like Michael Kenna have combined the square format with black and white and a minimalist aesthetic to produce a powerful body of work.

Contemporary examples of square format photography appear in the millions via Instagram, which is founded on this format, although Flickr and Pinterest also display galleries and portfolios of square format photography, often by photographers who enjoy making the most of the fashion for toy or junk film cameras, in addition to those who remain loyal to the pixel.

Panoramic images can be usefully employed by landscape photographers in particular, where a long sweep of horizon can be contained within the wide stretch of a letterbox-style frame, the photographer thereby emphasizing the flat, extended horizon much as the way our eyes naturally scan left-to-right or right-to-left. Archi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Basic design theory
• 2 The elements of design
• 3 First design principles
• 4 Depth and scale
• 5 Movement and flow
• 6 Emphasis and emotion
• 7 Putting it all together
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements and picture credits