Niagara – © John Neel
Breaking the rules – Rules are only rules!
Rules when followed absolutely completely restrict creativity.
Personally, I do not want restrictions to interfere with my creative endeavors. In order to be truly creative, it would seem best to have total freedom.
Steadfast rules, at least in the world of creativity, are really only guides to allow you to produce compositions that have been found to produce acceptable imagery.
In photography, rules are not a set of laws. Rules are guidelines that may be followed. They may also be broken.
The rules as I see them, are a starting point. They provide a foundation that you can use to begin the process of breaking away from standards.
For the most part, in the old days of photography, there were strict compositional rules. Rules such as the rule of thirds were used to produce balance in an image. Using the rule keeps the eye within the frame of the photograph. It kept the motion (how the viewer follows the scene with there eyes) in the frame and pulled the attention to the main subject.
As a result, images began to look the same. With everyone following the same parameters, images became trapped in the quagmire of restricted conventions. All images of flowers looked like every other picture of a flower. Landscapes, still life, portraits, and other subject matter also took on a similar likeness. Images were judged by how well they followed the rules. Images became clichéd. And in many photographic circles to this day, this is still the case. They look unoriginal, unimaginative, extremely behind the times.
American Stage – © John Neel
Today, it is acceptable to break away, to explore endless possibilities and to find your own unique voice. I would say for a good deal of new imagery, photography has grown away from the overworked look of the past. But, there is plenty of room for new thinking and fresh imaginative works to be done. photographic history is still a short period of time.
What one needs to understand is that the rules act like a language structure similar to writing. The standards act as a means to help us form the visual content into a coherent idea. They help us to produce a phrasing of sorts that others can follow. After all, photography is a language, as is all art.
Rather than throwing out all of the rules, we can use them in different ways to construct a new kind of composition that can still be understood by our audiences. After all, we are trying to communicate something to our viewers. Ultimately, it is the idea of the subject that we want to convey.
Alternatively, simply breaking away from guidelines, for the sake of eliminating the rules is not the answer. Rather, it is a compromise that has to be considered with every image we produce.
The rules serve a purpose that should not be ignored. Breaking away means that we comprehend the reason for a rule and attempt to modify the concept to produce a similar result. We learn to improvise an alternative to the rule that allows us to break away and still communicate the concept. We are reinventing the rule to our own purpose while maintaining the characteristic that the rule served to govern.
Regardless of what we do, it is still important to ensure such things as balance, motion and all of the things that rules produce. We are simply modifying what we know about those rules to realize a more unique vision of the subjects we photograph.
Breaking the rules implies that we understand how rules work and therefore realize that there are ways to modify them for our own purpose.
In the end, we are simply bending the rules to support our own creative intent. In doing so, we become free to see the world with new eyes.
NOTICE of Copyright: THIS POSTING AS WELL AS ALL PHOTOGRAPHS, GALLERY IMAGES, AND ILLUSTRATIONS ARE COPYRIGHT © JOHN NEEL AND ARE NOT TO BE USED FOR ANY PURPOSE WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT FROM THE WRITER, THE PHOTOGRAPHER AND/OR lensgarden.com. THE IDEAS EXPRESSED ARE THE PROPERTY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHER AND THE AUTHOR.