On Balance III

I quoted Rudolf Arnheim a few posts back with his contention that our eyes have been reduced to instruments with which to identify and measure. And through a devoted study of his writing I have come to agree with him but the question remains, "How do we retrain our eye to find what we have been missing?" "How do we find the recognizable mental impression of something?"

My first indications in life that I had to retrain my eye was when I would come upon a scene that absolutely took my breath away and yet my photographic endeavors of such scenes were amateurish at best. My search for photographic methods to improve my photography helped but lacked a certain predictability and looked like everything else. I was looking in the wrong area for improvement.

Most studies of composition are studies of how we see and perceive things. And since we are well trained at seeing before we can talk, we often discard critiques of our vision. Especially since most training in composition starts out with a study of simple shapes i.e. a small black circle placed on a white square. But much can be learned very quickly about balance by considering different positions of the circle on the square that could never be accomplished in a natural environment. Nature is far too complex to start out with.

Last week I gave some general properties about some elements and how they affect balance. I would like to give a quick little exercise now to demonstrate some of these properties. Below you see a basic scale with two evenly sized rectangles, the left colored yellow and the right colored red.

Except for the two elements of color and location/position discussed last week, everything else about this composition is neutral. And set up as such it is a wonderful exercise on how much the force of gravity influences the sense of balance. Clearly out of balance, it appears to me that the yellow box will be launched into space at any moment.

Last week I said that red is heavier than yellow and an object of a given size and shape will appear heavier on the right compared to the left. Let's take a look at the example with the red and yellow switched. This example shows how confusing this can get when only dealing with two elements (color and location) as one can certainly have difficulty in determining which is more out of balance. But there are more things going on than just color and location.

While making these examples, the balance changed simply with different magnifications in Photoshop. I originally started out with a white background and black scale but decided to swap those colors in the interest of keeping things as simple as possible. When I was using a white background, I essentially framed the work which has an effect on balance and that started to confuse things further. I hope the black background, matching the background of the blog will help to isolate the scale and allow us to focus on just color and location.

And finally, I positioned the red rectangle on the scale where I thought it balanced the composition but I must admit that I have gone through several iteration of this and still I am not sure where it should go. Once again I have learned even more about what master artist in paint or sculpture has to go through to achieve a masterpiece.

So if you have made it this far, do me a favor and take a moment to say something in the comments below just to help me gauge readership.

Until next week