Photography Basics – photography as communication

Photography is all about communication. Communicating a scene or an object is similar to communicating in writing. It makes more sense if there is an order. Sentence take if we a word up jumble…

Sorry, if we take a sentence and jumble the words up, it has the same contents, but the meaning is lost. At the other extreme a poet can arrange the words to provoke feelings and thoughts outside of the sentence. In a visual way a photographer has to arrange the subjects/ objects in a scene so that they make sense, and artists will arrange object/ subjects in a scene to provoke emotions.

Landscape photographers will communicate through composition. They usually want everything to be in focus, so that it feels like you are there in the scene, but to invite you into the scene, the landscaper will use objects carefully to invite you in. Imagine two parts of a wide river, one is just water from bank to bank, the other has stepping stones. You will likely pay more attention to the part with stepping stones because even if you don’t want to cross, the invite is there and this provokes thought. The landscape photographer will find objects in the foreground which invite you to wander into the picture.

Stepping stones

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A portrait photographer will use focus to communicate. A large aperture such as f/2.8 will allow the photographer to focus on a very narrow plain, i.e. the face or eyes, and everything else will fall out of focus. This works as communication because it is holding your attention on a very specific part of the image. This technique is also used in macro or close-up photography. Focus is one way of isolating the subject from the background.

Focus on the mouse

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In photographic art, the most important communication is that of emotion. You want the view to share your feeling of when you were there.

Photoshop can also be used to isolate your subject, using selection techniques, you can reduce colour or even blur the background to bring focus to the subject.

Sometimes it is good enough just to fit everything you want into the frame, but photography gets closer to art when the photographer communicates well.

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