The eye's journey

All the elements in your photographs are fighting for the viewer's attention.

All the elements in your photographs are fighting for the viewer's attention. Thus, if we have deliberately chosen these elements in the composition, the eye has a journey ahead of it. Where the eye goes, how it gets there and where it "lingers," all affect how the viewer reads the photograph.

The eye's journey

If you build your photos with a single element in the center of the frame, you run the risk of getting boring photographs. The viewer's eye will go directly to that element and linger there. With that, the image is also immediately "seen," no matter how beautiful it may be.

Photographers who rely on multiple elements in their composition, for example to tell a story or bring a little more tension into the image, need to consider how the eye moves between those different elements and the frame as a whole.

So if you want to take this into account, you will need to have (or learn) a sense of visual mass. Understand which element the eye is drawn to first, which second, and so on. Once you know that, you can plot the eye's journey.

Visual Literacy

Not sure how the eye's journey goes yet? Then start practicing with pictures (or better yet photographers) that you admire. This is a great exercise to increase your visual literacy.

The great thing is that once you understand the journey of the eye, you can ask yourself if your photo is making the viewer take the journey you envisioned!

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That’s it for now

Oh wait, one more thing... As this newsletter has gained quite a bunch of new readers in the last weeks- you know who you are, thank you! - I’d like to ask a question:

Are you working or experimenting with AI in your photos? Please reach out as I’m planning a newsletter on this topic and I like to gather some perspectives.

Till next time!

Marcel Borgstijn