Read This If You Want to Take Great Photographs

Visual weight

Reducing it down

For other examples:

Guy Bourdin p. 23

This image doesn’t have the busyness of the last. But even with all that space, none of it seems unnecessary. Everything is exactly where it should be. It has the same sense of cold order as the landscaped industrial park it depicts.

Here Lewis Baltz felt the visual weight of each element. He didn’t just see a garage door surrounded by a brick wall and an area of tarmac. Instead he reduced everything down to two-dimensional shapes and tones.

Don’t see the world as it is. See it as a photograph.

Notice how much ‘heavier’ the dark ground seems compared to the light wall, and how this has influenced the amount of space Baltz has given them in the frame. See how the grey of the ...