Why Some Photographs Work – But Most Don’t.
A Blueprint For Successful Photography.
Think of photography like a “signal”. – The photographer creates the signal; it’s transmitted to the viewer, and the viewer decodes it to understand “The Story”. The viewers benefit, and the purpose of the picture is “The Story” that signal contains. – The photographer’s job is to create a high-quality signal and control its content. – But, if you don’t create a good “Story” or understand the “Viewer”, signals fail. – This tutorial explains “The Story” and “The Viewer”.
Photographs Must: “Stop, Captivate and Reward the Viewer”.
Prague, Czech Republic.
Let’s Define “Successful Photography”.
An Overview of The Photographer’s Challenge.
Good photographs stimulate the viewer’s curiosity, imagination, thoughts, and feelings; they evoke an emotional response. – Pictures are like conversations; your picture makes a statement, and viewers respond, but if your photograph has nothing to say, it’s a dead-end conversation. Photographs fail when a viewer doesn’t understand the conversation or finds the conversation dull and uninteresting. Viewers want a benefit. Don’t just show me “what you saw”. Tell me something about “what you saw”. – Would you engage in a dull and confusing conversation with someone who has nothing interesting to say? No. – Pictures communicate “A Story”. – Successful photography makes the viewer “Think”.
Being a good photographer means learning “Visual Communication”, not cameras or equipment. – We read books because they communicate ideas, and look at photographs for the same reason. – The only difference is authors use written language, photographers, artists and painters use visual language: the purpose is always communication. Photographers must learn how to be good visual communicators, “visual authors,” who “speak” fluently using visual language. – Without language, we can’t communicate, and if the photograph doesn’t communicate, then it fails as a photograph because it gives no benefit to the viewer. – First, let’s understand “The Story” your photograph communicates.
Glencoe Cottage, Scotland.
First: How We Create “The Story”.
What are you telling me about the subject you show me?
Step 1: How To Create “The Story”.
A photograph consists of three elements: subject, context and mood. – The combination of all three forms the basis of a story. Think of word association. At the camera, break down your composition into the minimum number of words; one word must be an adjective. For example, the photograph below: Cottage (subject), Mountains (context) and Isolated (mood and adjective). – The portrait would be: Person (subject), Room (context), and Happy (adjective), or an event would be: Demonstration (subject), London (context), and Violent (adjective). Reducing your photograph down to the most minimal words possible – gives you the core components of your story. It gives you “Story Clarity”.
Think of a portrait: the physical subject only shows us what they look like, but their mood, expression, and the environment bring them to life and tells us something unique about them. What you show me, tells me “what it is or where you are”. The mood “gives it life and tells me how you feel”. – “The Story” means conveying “something greater” than just what the physical subject looked like. Identify a quality that makes the object, person, location or event unique; emphasise that quality and visually communicate it to viewers in a single image. – “Light creates life”. Light brings your story to life, creates the mood, and pushes viewers’ emotional buttons. – Portraying light is a very powerful “storyteller”.
Glencoe Cottage, Scotland.
Step 2: Stories need “Order, Structure & Emphasis”.
Think of your composition as a theatrical play. Your subject is the lead actor. The context is the supporting cast and stage backdrop. The mood is the stage lighting. – We must create a “visual hierarchy”, order and structure relative to the importance of the content. We use emphasis to make the lead actor, our hero, instantly identifiable to the viewer, and we build the picture entirely around the lead actor and what you want to say about your hero. – Everything else is only a supporting role. The viewer “joins the dots” and creates a “story” in their imagination as they work out the relationship between the lead actor and the supporting cast. – The stage lighting creates the mood and how viewers feel.
Step 3: Simplify & Amplify “The Story” in Post-Production.
The camera records everything it “sees”, and what it “sees” may be chaotic and visually confusing. There’s a limit to how much order, structure and emphasis you can achieve through camera composition alone. Post-production is where we amplify the story: clean and boost the signal. A percentage of our signal will be “lost in transit”. Therefore, the more pure we make the signal, the more efficient and effective it is; because a weak, confused, or noisy signal won’t communicate well. More critically, when we alter the input signal, we alter the output signal; we can influence the viewer’s response. In post-production, we simplify, refine, and strengthen the story so that it communicates more powerfully.
Phone Box, England.
It’s Clinical, but – Consider “Pictures as Products”.
People want to invest “minimum effort for maximum benefit”. Think of a photograph like any product you have ever bought: its purpose is to provide a benefit to the end user and deliver a good user experience. The picture is our product, the end user is our viewer, and the benefit is mental stimulation. – The “purpose” is the story, and “Visual Efficiency & Mental Stimulation” creates the “good user experience”: the aim is to “Make the journey quick and easy, and the destination interesting”. – Would you buy a product that had no purpose and gave no benefit?
Have you ever had a conversation with someone who has a lot to say, but you learn very little? You don’t know the point of the conversation, and it’s frustrating. You just want to leave. If you merely record “what you saw” and just show everything, you’re basically telling the viewer to create their own story. That’s like being told to “cook your own meal” when you go out to a restaurant. Your job is to “Tell a Story”. – Mentally write a very short caption before you shoot, summarise your story in caption form. – Your photograph is a simple illustration of that caption.
Clovelly, England.
To Create “The Story” – Ask 3 Questions:
What is the subject of my photograph?
What do I want to tell you about my subject?
How am I going to tell you that in a visual way?
Don’t just show me “what you saw”. – Tell me something about “what you saw”.
Next: Understand “The Viewer”.
Viewers “Read Pictures” using “Universal Visual Language”.
One half of the equation is creating “The Story”, but the other half of the equation is understanding “The Viewer” who reads the story. There’s no point in creating a story if the viewer can’t understand it; it’s just a waste of time. There is no point creating a signal that can’t be decoded. We need to understand how everyone reads images using a “natural visual language”. – Now, there’s an incredibly important critical concept that photographers overlook – “People dictate the language. Photographers only dictate the content”. – I’ll explain this with an analogy.
If I only speak English and travel to Japan, people won’t understand me. If I want to communicate in Japan, it’s not their job to learn English; it is my job to learn Japanese. They dictate the rules; I’m in their country! – Photography is a visual communication which uses “visual language”. People dictate the language, not the photographer. It’s the photographer’s job to be fluent in “visual language”, if you want to communicate stories successfully to viewers. If you can’t speak the language, you can’t create good photographs. Visual language is a common weakness.
The reason why photographers go wrong and why most pictures fail is that photographers don’t appreciate one absolute, unchangeable, and basic fact. – We can’t control “How people process images”. We can only control “The pictures we give people to process”. – We must adapt our photograph to the viewer because the viewer cannot adapt their “reading process” to our pictures. – If viewers can’t process our pictures, our pictures have no purpose for viewers; they give no benefit. – If photographs aren’t created in the language viewers understand, they fail.
Not everyone makes pictures, but everyone processes images. It’s pre-programmed into our brains to make sense of the world around us and survive, and we all process images the same way: we gather information, process it, and then generate a response. Our photograph is nothing more than visual data that needs processing. If we reverse-engineer this intuitive process, learn how people process images, we can use that knowledge as guidelines to create successful photographs; they communicate a story to viewers in the visual language viewers understand.
People judge photography based on intuition, NOT, on their knowledge of photography. That’s why people can recognise good photography but not explain why it’s good. – The only common denominator people share worldwide is human nature. Human nature defines how people perceive, process and respond to visual images. – Therefore, human perception defines our universal visual language, which then goes on to define the guidelines to “Create successful photographs”, not photography. – Photography is only one incredibly small aspect of people.
If we create in one language, but viewers read in another, our photograph fails.
Ghent, Belgium.
Visual Perception – “How People Process Pictures”.
Why The Process Dictates Our “Visual Language”.
First, We Must Understand “Three Basic Principles” About People.
The brain’s primary function is survival: conserving time, effort, energy, and resources helps survival. Thinking requires enormous resources, so the brain prefers “not to think” but to automate everything at a subconscious level that requires very few resources. This keeps the resource-intensive conscious level free for important problem-solving, planning, and investigation: “thinking”. However, we’re only aware of something when it’s at a conscious level, and we can’t engage with something we’re not aware of. – We can’t “think” about anything if it’s subconscious.
Second, when we’re born, we have no memories. Our memory is built as we gain new knowledge and experiences. To conserve resources, our brain has evolved a “predictive process”. – We constantly use our prior knowledge and experience to predict “what we will see”. – If “what we see” matches “what we predict to see”, we don’t investigate it, because investigating “what we already know” is a waste of our resources for no benefit. – It’s only when we don’t see “what we predict to see” that we will invest resources to “think” about it to resolve the discrepancy.
Third, our brain constructs and maintains a three-dimensional mental model of the world around us to make sense of the world and navigate within it to survive. – The brain, therefore, prioritises three-dimensional “real-world” visual information; it helps update our three-dimensional model, and de-prioritises flat two-dimensional “graphic” information because it adds little value to our three-dimensional model. Photographs are two-dimensional, low-priority “graphic” information, not high-priority “real world” information. – Our brain doesn’t want your photograph.
We learn to “read visually” quickly from birth, but we don’t learn to “write visually”. – The ability to visually read the world around us is critical for our survival. The ability to create or write visually has no survival benefit, so we never learn it. Reading visually is a natural ability; creating visually is a learned skill. Why is this relevant? – Because we can recognise a good photograph, we assume we can make a good photograph. We can’t quantify: “What we don’t know” – So, we overestimate “What we do know” and underestimate “What there is to know”.
Why These Principles Affect Your Pictures.
By default, the brain will process your photograph subconsciously, as it does all other visual data, and assumes it is only “useless background noise”. The assumption is reinforced by the fact that your photograph is flat, two-dimensional data, which is of little value because it doesn’t help update our three-dimensional mental model of the world around us. If, in addition, your photograph shows viewers “what they predict to see” or “have seen before”, then it’s a waste of their resources to “think” about it because they’ve seen it before; it provides no benefit.
Do you see a critical conflict emerging, a perfect “Catch-22”? – Two equally important fundamental principles are now in direct conflict with each other. On the one hand, we defined successful photography as “it makes viewers think”. Yet, on the other hand, our brain “prefers not to think,” and the brain dictates the rules. – The “Catch-22 a photographer must resolve is – How do we make the viewer “think about an image”, when their brain doesn’t want to “think about the image”, yet, if we don’t make the viewer “think” – it has no purpose and offers no benefit.
The solution to this “Catch-22” is found in understanding the criteria that our brain uses to select images to “Keep” and think about, and what images it selects to “Delete” and not think about. – This is the brain’s “Deletion Filter” – The “Keep or Delete Process”. – The important point to remember is that our photograph isn’t special; it’s treated the same as any other visual data from our eyes, and all data is passed through the filter. – The solution to our “Catch-22” is to manipulate the input signal. “If we alter the input, we alter the output”. – Edit the visual data input.
Florence, Italy.
Stand Out From “Background Noise”.
The Selection Process – The Brain’s “Keep” or “Delete” Filter.
If our brain processed every piece of incoming visual data in detail, it would be overwhelmed in seconds and cease to function. Yet, if it didn’t identify the useful information, it would risk our survival. Therefore, the brain applies a brutally simple, efficient rule: It treats all incoming data as “useless by default” – but first passes it through a quick filter to check for any “useful data”, and then it only investigates that data in detail.
The Deletion Filter – A Simplistic “Motorway Analogy”.
Think of every image as a car on a motorway; the traffic moves at high speed. At one end, the “cars” start on the motorway at the eyes. At the other end, they simply disappear by default, as if they never existed, “unless something stops them”. Every car passes under a “speed camera”; the filter. – If a car triggers the “speed camera”, it’s directed off the motorway for detailed investigation. – If not, it continues and gets ignored.
In a fraction of a second, the “speed camera” filter checks for several signals. No one signal is enough; it’s a combination of signals that triggers the “speed camera” to direct your image off the “motorway” for detailed secondary investigation. The stronger the combined signal, the more successful your photograph is. Your photograph must trigger the “speed camera”, or it will be ignored by the viewer and fail as a photograph.
Glencoe, Scotland.
Five Principles Behind Good Photography.
How to Communicate a Good Visual Story.
The Filter Checks Five Main Criteria:
Our brain is drawn to anything new, novel, or different because it offers the potential to provide useful information we don’t already have. If I already know it or have seen it before, it’s a waste of my limited resources to investigate it again. I gain no benefit by doing so. Literal, generic images rarely succeed. – Simply recording a scene usually creates an image we have seen before; it’s not different enough to trigger curiosity. We must avoid giving the viewer “What they predict to see” or “Have seen before”. – New, novel, or different triggers “Mental Stimulation”.
The Gondola factory in Venice is an iconic location, but my transformation means it’s not a literal depiction.
Our brain assigns a subconscious “feeling” to an image before it understands what it’s about, tagging images as positive, negative or neutral. We associate a bright day with feeling “happy” and a grey day with feeling “depressed”. When we wake up, the light influences how we feel, our emotional state and some days are just “forgettable”; neutral. – Our emotions are influenced by the light because light creates the mood, drama and atmosphere we respond to every day. – Images need a clear mood and atmosphere to trigger emotion, “Mental Stimulation”.
The light, mood, drama, and atmosphere give the image a romantic, old-master feel.
Our brain prioritises survival: to identify and avoid potential threats, pain and danger, and to identify any resources for food or pleasure. Visual data that identifies opportunities that could affect our well-being is prioritised. – Photographs that feel “biologically relevant”. – Photographs that comment on our lives, featuring life, people, events, and moments in time. News and documentary images feel more “relevant” than the generic landscape image, which feels more like entertainment. – Photographs that are “biologically relevant” trigger “Mental Stimulation”.
The image has a surreal, even dystopian feel, but the vehicle and driver make the image more relatable.
Our brain constructs and updates a mental 3D model of the world around us to navigate and understand where we are within it. It prioritises 3D information because it updates our 3D model, whereas 2D graphical information, such as patterns, offer little benefit. Photographs with a sense of 3D form, space and distance deceive the brain into believing it’s 3D data from reality. – Create the 3D illusion, and you’ll upgrade the usefulness of the information. It tells viewers “where we are”. – Images that rely solely on 2D patterns or design don’t. – It’s “Visual Efficiency”.
A sense of spatial depth allows us to travel in and around the image, not just look at the image.
Our brain can’t decide if it’s “useful data” if it doesn’t know what it’s looking at first. The brain must understand what the shapes represent. It breaks shapes down into their simplest forms and then compares them with our prior knowledge and experience to assign a meaning. Is it a mountain, building, or person, etc? This allows for fast identification without investing time-consuming, detailed investigation. – Visual order, structure, emphasis, and simplicity make images faster to process. – Noise, confusion, ambiguity, or clutter all slow down “Visual Efficiency”.
Each facet of the buildings is clearly defined; the basic shapes are quickly understood.
The Deletion Filter – Initial Selection Ends.
The motorway is subconscious, and we’re unaware of it. The off-road links the subconscious to the conscious. – The visual data not flagged by the “speed camera” continues on the motorway and is ignored, while the visual data that is flagged by the “speed camera” is now diverted off the motorway. It’s not safe yet; it merely means that it shows signs of being “useful data”, and it’s worth investing the resources to investigate it in more detail. The data is escalated for final secondary investigation, but it’s closer to our conscious “thinking” level and to being successful.
Finally, Pass Secondary Investigation.
The Brain’s final “Keep” or “Delete” decision.
The very few cars or images that pass initial selection are then diverted off the motorway for secondary inspection. The brain uses the same five criteria again but examines the image in much greater detail – it’s no longer a quick glance, but a detailed investigation. – The “Keep” or “Delete” decision is based on whether the image provides sufficient benefit to be stored in memory for future use and reach our conscious level, against the resources required to do so. – More correctly, it’s “Keep or Ignore”: (An image can’t be deleted if it’s never been stored).
However, secondary inspection has a long queue of cars. – If your photograph isn’t visually efficient, then secondary inspection will also reject it simply because it takes too long to process. It would cause a traffic jam. – If your image fails secondary inspection, it’s simply overwritten by the next image in the queue. – If it passes secondary inspection, it’s then released and is now officially available for the viewer to engage with and think about at the conscious level. Your image must pass both inspections; if it does: – You have now created a “successful photograph”.
Congratulations – You’ve created a “Successful Photograph”.
Additional Points to Consider.
Unlike law, where you’re “presumed innocent until proven guilty”, the brain takes the opposite approach. It assumes “you’re guilty until proven innocent”. It assumes you’re guilty of making a photograph that has little value to viewers unless you prove otherwise. – You have to give the viewer a reason to care about your photograph because by default, they won’t. – It’s your job to make sure the signal is compatible with your viewer, contains a worthwhile message, and has minimal noise, so it’s clean and efficient. – Without tuition, you’re unlikely to achieve this.
A “disruptor element” disrupts our confirmation. We predict “what we will see” then wait for confirmation. If the confirmation is correct, the image remains subconscious and is ignored. If the confirmation isn’t correct, the image doesn’t match “what we predict to see”; it is diverted to the conscious level for investigation to resolve the discrepancy. The disruptor element is something “we don’t predict to see”. An element in a “predictable image” that makes the image “unpredictable”. This then triggers conscious investigation and forces the viewer to think.
The disruptor element is the image’s artistic treatment; it’s not what we expect to see.
Photographers often go to two extremes when editing. – They go for realism and create literal, generic-looking images that the brain ignores because they don’t trigger our curiosity, or go for dramatically different, and create images the brain ignores because it then labels them low-importance “2D graphic images”, not “real-world data”. Neither extreme provides maximum mental stimulation. Maximum mental stimulation is achieved only when there is a blend of “realism” and “different”. – Realism creates engagement. Different triggers curiosity and imagination.
Image editing is essential for two reasons. We create a raw file, which is a low-strength signal. Image-editing is needed to boost and clean the signal. Amplify the useful data, and remove the useless background “noise”. – However, if you edit poorly in post-production, you can destroy the signal quality. If you contradict the laws of nature in post-production, you degrade high-priority, useful 3D data to low-priority, useless 2D data because 2D data has little priority for survival. An example is making distant mountains too black, hoping contrast adds visual impact. By contradicting the laws governing spatial distance, the brain now labels it low-priority 2D graphic data, not high-priority and useful 3D data.
It’s the post-production that creates the emphasis, which draws the eye to the middle of the Town Hall building.
Prague Castle, Czech Republic.
Holborn Viaduct, London.
The Practical Benefits For Your Photography.
It “Fast-Tracks” Making Successful Photography.
Successful photography is in the sweet spot between two extremes. – Literal photography doesn’t benefit the viewer because it shows them ‘what they expect to see’. Not showing anything new doesn’t ignite their curiosity. – Photography people can’t understand, won’t benefit the viewer because you can’t engage with something you don’t understand; there’s no “point of reference”. Therefore, engaging photography has an underlying foundation of realism – the illusion of three-dimensional form and spatial distance, which gives the picture a point of reference to understand it – plus a disruptor element so we don’t give viewers “what they predict to see”; this forces them to think. It triggers curiosity.
Successful photography is engaging; it requires a balancing act between turning up the “realism” element of the signal and turning down the “graphic” signature of photography, while retaining an element that triggers the viewer’s curiosity. – This is why post-production is so critical; it’s where we fine-tune this balancing act. The raw file out of the camera is too unrefined; the signal is too weak and polluted to be effective. This logic doesn’t dictate your style; it only defines the underlying scientific principles of successful photography. – If you then overlay these principles with your personal style, you create images that are both successful and unique. – Isn’t that the ideal goal for all photographers?
The solution is to force the viewer to investigate your photograph, then you divert it from the preferred automated subconscious processing to conscious investigation and engagement. Give your photograph qualities that make it stand out from the background “noise”. – Make your photograph “useful data” for the viewer. – If you don’t, – Let me explain “The Filter”.
We may see Photography as self-expression, but it fails as self-expression if people don’t understand what you’re expressing. Focus the eye. Stimulate the mind.
A Quick Checklist For Your Photographs:
Look at your photos, ask yourself these questions:
- What are you telling me about the subject you show me?
- Does it portray 3D form, volume and spatial distance?
- Does it have a sense of light, mood, drama or atmosphere?
- Does it show “What we predict to see” or “Have seen before”?
- Does it have visual order, structure, emphasis, and simplicity?
- Does it have a “disrupter element” to remove the predicatability factor?
- Does it trigger an emotional response: curiosity, imagination, thoughts, and feelings?
If we limit photography to enjoyment alone, we forget the viewer and don’t prioritise the picture. We don’t consider every aspect needed to create a successful photograph. – But if we learn how to create photographs for other people, we then create more successful photographs for ourselves. We improve as photographers. By teaching you this picture-making knowledge, I remove the guesswork, stress, and frustration, and your reliance on a chaotic “shoot, hope and pray” approach. – You gain greater technical confidence, creative satisfaction and enjoyment.
Does this sound theoretical, academic, or even boring? Possibly. – Do I apologise? No. – My job is to improve your photography. Do you want entertainment or knowledge that fast-tracks your improvement? Most enthusiasts take pictures for their own enjoyment but don’t consider the viewer. This knowledge is the missing link you need. I can give you innovative knowledge and insights, but I can’t make it all quick or “fun”. Photography alone gives us limited, superficial rules and personal opinions. – Human perception gives us fundamental facts we can trust.
This Tutorial is about Visual Communication:
Understanding the story of your photograph and the viewer you communicate with. The application is taught on workshops. Sum up relate to visual communication.
“Successful Photography takes Knowledge, Not just Cameras and Equipment”.
Seven Sisters, England.
Good photography succeeds when it’s
“Visually Efficient & Mentally Stimulating”.
This Teaches The Theory. – Workshops Teach The Practical.
Let me help you improve your images.
The Workshops.
The Courses.
Let’s Talk …
Let’s chat live on a video call first, free of charge, with no obligation, and answer any questions or concerns you may have before making a booking. Just email me, and we will arrange a date to talk in person.
David Osborn Photography
69 Grange Gardens, Southgate,
London N14 6QN, England.
UK +44 (0) 771 204 5126
David@DavidOsbornPhotography.com
