They did and you can't always do that in this medium (photography). You will drive yourself insane. Personally, I liked the original post photo the best. I liked all the elements in it, it was real.
You do it whether you choose to recognise it or not. When you compose an image are you not isolating a specific pattern? With those four borders you not impose order on nature to define your composition? After all it is the ordered image, one with purpose, that separates it from the unstructured snapshot.
Object placement is just the ratio of it's distance from these borders. Balance and imbalance in it's simplest form is how things relate to the centre of your image, the ratio where distance is equal both horizontally and vertically. Oh dear, a measurable, geometric, mathematical point has crept into your organic space.
A level horizon is another geometric one that can be expressed in exact parallel terms and one you can also easily define as being correct or wrong with the naked eye. Oops, we've just linked geometric patterns with what's recognisable and discernible as right/wrong to the human eye (perspective may be another - how do you judge the door as being rustic and crooked if you're not comparing it's shape to the rigid geometry that true perspective dictates?).
Understanding this geometry is not about imposing
your own order on a image, its about recognising the natural geometry where order exists. By understanding this order you can more effectively create balance or tension in an image. Please note that I did not once say that this is the geometry you should follow, merely that this is the geometry that creates static balance.
Even Jasii's original is not unstructured, free-flowing or organic. It was cropped against a geometry whether recognised or not. By using tone-mapping and clarity/contrast the separation between the subject and background is less visually evident, their textures blend more, so you as a viewer look more to geometric order. Now Jasii has balanced the two extreme objects very well in the top left and bottom right. But it these objects that are balanced, and these objects that now have a visual stress. Although the subjects relate strongly to this diagonal, it is the diagonal itself that is prominent and it places the subject slightly off balance and in so doing displaces the accent from the subject an towards the extreme objects:
Just in the same way that we can see a level horizon from an un-level one, so we can discern pattern by relationships in scale and distance. You can see this by the way the balance of the objects in the extreme corners have a relationship that draws your eye.
The natural balance point of the family is the baby's face, see how the relationship that's stressed fights against this:
How many times have you seen a comment about the inclusion of an object of known size "for scale" in an image? It happens because we look and seek scale and pattern and notice when it's not present. Scale is just the rhythm of how one thing relates to another within the borders you impose on nature.
So what happens if we remove the accent on the diagonal by removing (clumsily
) the object in the top left. See how the stress changes to between the natural centre of the image and the shoes, but the symmetry changes with it:
By the simple act of moving the border we change the symmetry to one of more balance. Rhythm and pattern is also played out in the differences between light and dark, sunlight and shadow, by adding too much clarity/sharpness you tend to equal these out and complicate the pattern as we tend to see the pattern as a whole and are less able to separate the elements. Just as you can discern difference between skin and concrete so you can also discern similarity, sharpening takes the softness away from skin.
There is always more than one solution so I offer these not as correct but just as different so you can see these differences and the effect they have:
So you are imposing an order on an image whether you try and understand it or try to ignore it. The trouble with being a photographer is that we tend to see elements and not the entire image. We like the relationship of objects in the corners but don't always see how it affects the entire image, we like sharpness and contrast and tend to look at it in detail and the global effect becomes almost invisible to us. We see individual elements and effects and often impose a logic on an image which is based on how we want them to be seen. We think this order and we see this order because we look for it. What we don't always see is how someone only with experience of the real world perceives the image, someone with no pre-conceived ideas of geometry, who has no experience of photo-editing programs. Someone who looks at the image you restrained in your four borders and tries to make sense out of it in exactly the same way that they look at the real world and make sense of what they see.
Jasii, your image is great and my apologies for taking liberties with it to underline a point.
