10
Past influences
Intuition
Many cameramen insist that composition is intuitive and assume that framing decisions are based on personal and subjective opinion. Even a cursory examination of an evening's output of television will demonstrate the near uniformity of standard conventions in composition. The exceptions to what is considered ‘good’ composition are either provided by inexperienced cameramen who have yet to become aware of professional techniques (e.g., ‘video diaries’) or those productions where there has been a conscious decision to be ‘different’. This usually entails misframing conventional shots in the mistaken belief that something new and original has been created. In effect, it is simply mispronouncing standard visual language.
These conventions are learnt and do not arise spontaneously as intuitive promptings. Their origins are to be found in changes in painting styles over the last 500 years, in the influence of still photography and in changes in the style and the technology of film and television production.
No one working in the media can escape the influence of past solutions to visual problems. The evidence is contained in the products of more than a century of film making and half a century of television production. These are consciously or unconsciously absorbed from the moment we begin to watch moving images. Whereas most people never concern themselves with the nature of these influences, anyone who wishes to make a career in visual communication should be aware of the changes and influences on current conventions in composition and examine the assumptions that may underpin their own ‘intuitive’ practices.
Early influences
Greek and Renaissance ideals
The concept of proportion and ratio in composition played an important part in Greek/Roman art and architecture and reappears in some contemporary discussion in the ‘format’ war (see Chapter 7, ‘The shape of the screen’).
Figure 10.1 To create a ‘Golden Rectangle’, use the diagonal of one half of a square (a) as a radius to extend the dimensions of the square. The ‘Golden Rectangle’ has the proportions a:b = c:a and was used by the Greeks in architectural design and by Renaissance painters and architects
Compositional balance using this ratio revolves around positioning the main visual elements on the subdivisions obtained by dividing the golden section according to a prescribed formula (Figure 10.1).
The Rule of Thirds
The academic emphasis on proportion and ratio was probably the precursor to a popular compositional convention called the Rule of Thirds. This ‘rule’ proposes that a useful starting point for any compositional grouping is to place the main subject of interest on any one of the four intersections made by two equally spaced horizontal and vertical lines (Figure 10.2(a) and (b)).
The ratio of dividing the frame into areas of one-third and two-thirds is close to the approximation of a golden section division. These ratios occur so often in Western art, architecture and design that they became almost a visual convention. The proportions are learnt and anticipated in a way that is similar to the expectation of a listener to the resolution of musical harmony. Because of this unconscious anticipation, composition based on academic principles can seem stale and static to those people who have experienced the avalanche of visual imagery generated by contemporary technology. A repetitive simple tune can rapidly lose its appeal if continuously heard. Compositions that provide no visual surprises are quickly ‘consumed’ and require no second appraisal.
Another convention of Renaissance composition, especially with religious subjects, is to position the main subject in the centre of the frame and then to balance this with equal weight subjects on either side (see Figure 13.1).
The equal duplication of figures on either side of the main subject gives the centre figure importance but splits the composition into two halves and can produce two equally competing subjects of interest. This style of precise formal balance on either side of the frame contrasts with later fashions in composition which sought, by more dynamic visual design, to create a strong sense of movement by leading the eye, by line and structure, around the frame.
The influence of photography
After the invention of the photographic image in the 1830s, the initial novelty of accurate, realistic portraiture gave way to attempts at photographic ‘art’. Photographers grouped their subjects according to the academic conventions of the day and were inclined to favour themes and subjects similar to academic painting. The long exposure required by the early photographic process also required the subjects to remain stiff and immobile to avoid blurring. The evolution of faster film allowed snapshot street scenes to be captured. The composition now consisted of enclosing a frame around a continuing event and this, compared with academic painting, resulted in unbalanced and scattered compositional groupings.
People were captured on the move, entering and leaving the frame, which resulted in quite different images from the carefully posed groups of the long exposure film. The accidental quality of these snapshot compositions was considered by many to be more realistic and life-like than the immobile studio set-ups. Painters were attracted by the sense of movement that could be suggested by allowing subjects to hover on the edge of the frame (Figure 10.3).
When the frame cuts a figure there is the implication that the frame position is arbitrary, that the scene is endless and a portion of the event just happened to be cut by the frame at that point by chance. The accidental character of the boundary was indeed arbitrary in many snapshots but, as a conscious compositional device, it had been used centuries before in Donattelo reliefs and in paintings by Mantegna and it is to be found, as a considered design element, in Japanese painting (Figure 10.4).
In an outside broadcast event the viewer may be aware that they are being shown selected ‘portions’ of the event and that the frame can be instantly adjusted by zooming in, to provide more detailed information or by zooming out, to include more of the televised event.
Photography developed a compositional style of the instantaneous framing of an everyday event. The most effective ‘freeze frame’ images of arrested motion use the tension created by subjects moving apart from each other, and the relationship of subjects (often on the edge of frame) in opposition to their environment. The considered ‘spontaneity’ of advertising imagery is an artifice carefully crafted to make use of naturally occurring events and presented in an attempt at innocent simplicity and naturalness. The sophisticated technique used to create a seemingly accidental, non-designed image is a long way removed from the typical ‘holiday’ snapshotter who haphazardly puts a frame around an event and rarely achieves a print with the impact of the controlled image made by an experienced photographer. The quality of ‘random chance’ in a composition therefore contains many formal devices that an experienced photographer will employ and exploit.
In copying from photographs in the mid-nineteenth century, artists attempted to correct this lack of order, the unnaturalness of the snapshot and the lack of pictorial logic, according to academic compositional principles. The distortion of perspective that sometimes gives the snapshot its special power and the accidents of composition were ironed out when painters translated photographs into paintings. Some painters, however, recognized that the ‘non-style’ of snapshot composition had a vitality lacking in conventional groupings and gave it artistic respectability by using in many of their paintings the characteristics of the arbitrary frame and perspective of short exposure photography (see Figure 10.3).
More recent influences
If photographic imagery provided an alternative to an over-intellectual approach to composition, many late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century painters also challenged the received conventions of academic subject and design. Part of their traditional role of providing a visual record of faces and places was also being eroded by the growth of photography.
Figure 10.2 The ‘Rule of Thirds’ proposes that a useful starting point for any compositional grouping is to place the main subject of interest on any one of the four intersections made by two equally spaced horizontal and vertical lines. Dividing the frame into areas of one-third and two-thirds is a method of constructing a golden rectangle (1.618:1) and these intersections were often used to position key elements of the composition
Figure 10.3 Place de la Concord (Vicomete Ludvic Lepic and his daughters) (1875), Degas
The predominant style of painting in the mid-nineteenth century favoured realistic illusionism. Photography, in providing an accurate imitation of external realities, reinforced this existing fashion and to some extent supplanted the social role of the artist as the only supplier of visual copies of nature, people or places.
In the 1840s photographic portraiture challenged the traditional painted portrait. This was followed in the 1850s, as the emerging technology allowed, by a fashion for landscape photography. Increasing film sensitivity during the next three decades permitted shutter speeds of up to 1/1000th second to be used and enabled fast-moving objects to be frozen. Artists discovered that their customary methods of depicting objects in motion were false even though they appeared to correspond to normal perception.
The increased shutter speeds of the 1860s and 1870s allowed snapshot compositions of normal everyday street activity, subjects that had rarely been thought suitable for painting. This type of urban realism not only displayed a new type of composition, utilizing the accidental and random design of people and traffic, frozen in motion, but also provided new viewpoints of these events, such as the high angle shot from the top of a building looking down on to a street. When, in the late 1880s, Kodak announced ‘You press the button – we do the rest’, a flood of new ‘image makers’ were unleashed, unfettered by academic art training or academic precepts.
Realism was considered by some to be the new enemy of art and it was thought to have been nurtured by the growth of photography. Those artists who considered photographs to be no more than ‘reflections in a looking glass’, had to consider what personal aesthetic qualities they brought to their own paintings. In many cases they moved away from an attempt at the literal imitation of nature to more impressionistic images and later, to colour and form as the prime subject of their work. If the camera alone was to be the final arbiter in questions concerning visual truths then artists would move to new themes and subjects and explore the underlying structure of the psychology of perception and the ambiguity of imagery. They examined the differences between what one saw and what one knew about a subject.
Figure 10.4 The Haneda Ferry and Benten Shrine (1858), Hiroshige. This composition pre-dates the widespread use of wide-angle foreground framing in film and television
Apart from the early photographic attempts to mimic academic painting subjects and groupings, the influence in the nineteenth century appeared to flow from photographs to painting. When painting found new themes and forms away from realistic illusionism in the twentieth century, photographers followed their lead and also attempted to place more emphasis on form and structure – on the abstraction of design from nature.
The use of simple shapes devoid of detail, patterns produced by everyday objects, the reduction of tone, colour producing sharp contrasts, ‘distressed’ texture and fragments of printed ephemera are popular photographic images influenced by the changing styles in painting in the first decades of the twentieth century.
There developed a two-way influence between painting and photography with some artists rejecting the Renaissance perspective of a single viewpoint and ultimately eliminating figurative subjects from their frame. Many became interested in creating compositions of colour, line and tone abstracted from three-dimensional objects.
These investigations into the nature of two-dimensional pattern on a surface influenced photographers who used monochrome to simplify the image and to create semi-abstract designs of line, light and shade. Many contemporary photographic images used in advertising are influenced by the experiments carried out in painting 70 or 80 years ago.
A painter has control of all the design elements in his painting and works towards a particular effect. A photographer, recognizing the freshness of the design, can find a parallel image and, by careful selection, recreate the more abstract graphic image of fine art. The cycle of ‘new’ art image followed by repetition and recreation within photography (particularly in advertising) all occurred during the twentieth century. The process reached a peak in the 1960s when painting incorporated advertising imagery. This reworking of the original commercial graphic conventions was immediately reclaimed by advertising and emerged as a new photographic style.
Photographic style
There was anxiety in the mid-1860s of the growing photographic style in painting. There was fierce resistance from the academic exhibitions to hanging paintings that appeared to be based on photographs and there was a heated debate about the nature of photographic style.
As we have discussed, one aspect of monochrome compositions is the tendency to emphasize line and tone. Also, people were unused to some types of photographic perspective that, although often identical to retina perspective, remained ignored or unacknowledged because of size constancy (see Chapter 3, ‘Size constancy’). Photographic perspective, conditioned by size of reproduction, lens position, distance from subject and focal length, appeared to many people to be unnatural and distorted compared with perspective used in painting. Usually it was ‘unpainterly’ subjects that emphasized what were considered perspective distortions.
Photography allowed the most accurate reproduction of the most minute detail, which incited great interest in the general public even though, as one artist claimed, there is no great visual truth in counting how many slates there are on an image of a roof.
Although the eye unconsciously changes focus depending on the distance of the subject of interest, the degree of ‘out of focus’ of subjects at other distances goes unrecognized. Depending on the aperture used, a camera's depth-of-focus produces an image that may blur the foreground and background of a subject. This photographic zone of focus effect created a new visual representation of depth.
Alternative viewpoints, such as a high angle from a building looking down on to a street, appeared to be a photographic innovation unseen in painting. The ability, with high shutter speeds and extreme magnification, to reveal visual truths unavailable to normal human perception were amongst other photographic innovations that excited interest. Even blurred motion and photographic defects such as halation provided inspiration for artists such as Corot to experiment with new painting conventions.
The innovation of film technique
The development of film technique began in 1895/1910 and centred around finding methods of changing shot without distracting the audience. As we discussed in Chapter 1, a number of ‘invisible’ techniques were discovered and became the standard conventions of film making and later television.
Distinctive compositions that only made sense in the context of the film narrative (such as point-of-view shots) occurred pre-1914 when high and low angles began to be used. This style of composition, although not unique to film, was infrequently used in the still photography of the day.
As we discussed in Chapter 4, ‘The lens and perspective’, another convention that had an important influence on the composition of the shot was the ‘Vitagraph Angle’. The lens was positioned at eye height, then later chest height, and this produced foreground heads of figures higher in the frame than background figures. At times the camera was positioned at waist height, which resulted in a more dynamic relationship between foreground and background. These departures from head-high lens position also eliminated the large amount of dead space above the actors’ heads seen in many films of the period.
Development of TV camera technique
Standard television multi-camera conventions grew out of film technique and the same objectives of disguising technique in order to suspend disbelief in the viewer were adopted. The problem for actuality television was not to recreate ‘real time’ as in discontinuous film shooting but to meld together multi-camera shooting of an actuality event so that, for example, change of camera angle or cutting between different shot sizes was not obtrusive and distracting to the viewer. The aim once again was towards an ‘invisible technique’.
Summary
The origins of contemporary camerawork composition are to be found in changes in painting styles over the last 500 years, in the influence of still photography and in changes in the style and the technology of film and television production. The influence of past solutions to visual problems conditions much of current practice.
Photography in the nineteenth century developed a compositional style of the instantaneous framing of an everyday event. The most effective ‘freeze frame’ images of motion arrested use the tension between subjects moving apart, and subjects and their relationship to their surroundings. When the frame cuts a figure there is the implication that the frame position is arbitrary, that the scene is endless and a portion of the event just happened to be cut by the frame at that point by chance.
The innovations in film at the beginning of the twentieth century and television in the 1950s are still valid and much of the pioneering work in the first decades of the twentieth century remains intact in current camera technique.