WHY YOUR BEST PHOTOS ARE BEING IGNORED.

Think of every car as an image on a motorway. The traffic is moving at 147 mph. – At one end, the cars (images) enter through your eyes and, unless something stops them, they disappear at the far end. You never realise they existed because they never reached a conscious level.

On this motorway, every car passes under a “speed camera” (filter) and the camera only takes 1/7th of a second to assess each car. – If the car triggers the “speed camera”, it’s directed off the motorway for secondary investigation. If not, it stays on the motorway and is ignored.

It is absolutely critical that your photo triggers the “speed camera” in the viewer, because if it doesn’t, your photo will be treated like background noise and be ignored. You must get your photo off the motorway now, so it gets diverted to the viewer’s higher conscious level.

In that fraction of a second, the “speed camera” (filter) looks for a combination of signals. No one signal is enough; it’s the combination that triggers the “speed camera” to divert the car (image) off the “motorway” for secondary investigation. – The five criteria used are:

1. Survival Relevance – Will this help my survival?
The brain automatically prioritises potential threats, opportunities, or biologically important cues that could affect our well-being, especially when attention is limited. – Rapid decisions improve survival by conserving energy and directing processing toward what matters first.

Relevance to photography: Images often fail because they feel biologically irrelevant – no people, no action, no consequence. The brain prioritises information related to movement, life, time, and events. A moment in time, or the presence of humans, triggers stimulation.

2. Category Recognition – What is it?
The brain rapidly classifies the image into broad categories: face, car, landscape, building, by using simplified shapes and familiar visual patterns drawn from prior experience. This allows fast, efficient identification and sorting without detail, precision, or conscious analysis.

Relevance to Photography: Many images are confusing, ambiguous or cluttered, making the subject hard to identify. The brain struggles to decode the picture’s content. Order, structure, emphasis, and simplicity improve visual efficiency when categorising the content.

3. Spatial and Contextual Information – Where is it?
The brain determines whether the image represents a “3D Environment” (Place), an indoor or outdoor scene, or a “2D Graphic” (Pattern). Information that helps us build a mental 3D model of our location and context within the world for navigation. Scale, distance, orientation, etc.

Relevance to photography: Without spatial clarity, the depiction of three-dimensional form and spatial distance, the brain cannot orient itself. The brain gains little value in 2D patterns. The qualities convince the brain into thinking it’s seeing beneficial evidence of the real world.

4. Salience and Novelty – Is this interesting or beneficial?
Have I seen this before, based on my prior knowledge and experience? – Is it novel and new that could benefit me in the future, or is it similar to what I already know and offers nothing better or beneficial? If I already know it, it’s a waste of my limited resources to investigate it.

Relevance to photography: Literal, generic images rarely succeed. Simply recording a scene usually creates an image we have seen before; it lacks novelty and fails to surprise the brain. We must try to avoid giving the viewer “what they predict to see” or “have seen before”.

5. Emotional Tone (Valence) – How does it feel?
The brain assigns a subconscious “feeling”, tagging images as positive, negative, or neutral based on prior emotional knowledge and experience, whether the image feels rewarding, threatening, meaningful, or safely ignorable. If boring, there’s no benefit in investigating it.

Relevance to photography: We “feel” an image before we consciously understand it. – Many photos are emotionally flat or dull, with a neutral mood and atmosphere, causing the brain to ignore them. Expressive mood or tension triggers mental stimulation and engagement.

The minute number of cars (images) diverted off the motorway now undergo a secondary inspection using the same five criteria again, but at a much more detailed level. – The brain must be sure the information is worth using the limited resources of long-term memory.

At this stage, the image is evaluated at a conscious level in temporary memory, our RAM. – If the investigation is successful, the car (image) is released from secondary inspection, and it’s written to long-term memory, our hard drive. Viewers now mentally engage with the photo.

However, secondary investigation has a queue of cars (images), and it can’t spend too long investigating one car (image). If the image is confusing and not “visually efficient”, it also fails secondary investigation, because it would cause a “bottleneck” in the queue, a traffic jam.

If unsuccessful, the RAM is simply overwritten by the next car (image) in the queue, and our car (image) simply “disappears”. – This entire process is called “KEEP or DELETE”, and it takes about one to two seconds. We often feel a dopamine release later as a reward.

Science has defined what our photograph needs to be classified as “good”. – It must gain a final “KEEP” decision from the investigation process. – The process defines the five criteria to achieve this. If we give the brain an image that meets these criteria, it will always result in a “KEEP” decision. A photographer’s skill lies in repeatably meeting those criteria, every time.

However, because the principles are clearly defined and very specific, they can all be easily taught and learned. That’s what I do in my workshops. Quality is no longer solely a matter of luck and talent. Improvement is no longer a matter of personal opinion or following anothers artistic technique. The more fundamental our knowledge, the greater our creative freedom.

Most photos don’t fail due to technical issues with equipment; they fail because they don’t pass the visual investigation. The weakness of many photographers is that they don’t look outside photography at a fundamental level to find solutions that improve their pictures.

The critical takeaway is acknowledging that, by default, the viewer’s brain does not want your photographs unless you give it a reason to do so and then present the image in the correct form. This can be summed up as “Visual Efficiency & Mental Stimulation”.

Visual efficiency makes your picture easy for the brain to process – clear subject, readable forms, coherent space – while mental stimulation gives the brain a reason to care: novelty, tension, emotion, or the sense of an unfolding moment. Satisfying both ensures your photo is noticed, remembered, and felt. This isn’t talent, it’s a learned skill. I’ll teach you how to do it.