Design and Elements of it

Elements of design serve a twofold purpose: they serve as a guide for physically taking pictures and they allow the photographer to make his or her pictures more interesting and appealing to an audience. When using the elements of design, pictures become more structured and intentional as opposed to mindlessly pointing and shooting with a digital camera. When thought is put into the way a picture is taken, there is most likely an element of design involved.

The two effects of design I will be covering in this post are Filling the Picture Space and Amputation.

The act of Filling the Picture Space is to use a subject to fill the entire frame of a photo. According to Freeman Patterson, "The size of important objects in a photograph should be determined by the theme of the photograph." So, if the subject matter is, say, a flower, then that flower basically dictates the nature of the picture.

In this picture, my subject is a flower. Although it is fake, I really wanted to experiment with filling the frame with it, so I took a few test shots.  I have absolutely no visual effects on this picture except for the flash on my camera (samsung point and shoot). I love the way this turned out because not only does it fill the entire frame, it also saturates the color in a way that makes the flower look interesting. This picture represents Filling the Frame in that its subject (the pink flower) fills the entire space and catches the reader's attention.

The act of Amputation isn't actually "amputating" anything, but leaving out a body part when creating a composition. Patterson claims that "amputation weakens the composition only if it interferes with expression by drawing attention to itself," but it can be "offset...by placing lines or shapes or colors on the opposite side or corner to establish balance."

When I think of the design element Amputation, I think of the times when I've had to retake pictures because my friends claimed "their head got cut off." I wanted to do something different besides leaving out a hand or a foot. In this shot, I decided to get a picture of my nails (they are press-ons). Again, no effects whatsoever, save a bright flash. The flash made the biggest difference in this picture because the black in my nails stands out against the white of my laptop computer. The white background is what allows the composition to remain artistic, even when the "amputation" is intentional. This picture represents Amputation because the whole hand is not represented in the frame, but is instead "amputated" in the final composition.

In conclusion, Elements of Design are used in order to make photography more appealing to an audience and to guide the photographer in creating his or her picture, along with making the composition more appealing as a whole.