The Relationship of Light to Dark

For this lesson, we will manipulate only two of the variables that I mentioned at the beginning of Step 1: light-to-dark and in-focus-to-blur. Remember, it is the person creating the image who decides the journey that the viewer’s eye will take. And it is that journey that causes the viewer to see the story you wanted to tell.

How we control where the viewer’s eye will go is by manipulating variables such as focus, and light and dark. I contend that when we view anything at all, there is both an unconscious and a conscious element involved. First, our unconscious eye, or the anatomic structure that makes up the eye, scans in the predictable manner I described above. Then, the conscious eye, the mind’s eye, interprets ...

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