How do you analyze/categorize distracting visual elements?

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NorthernFocus said:
Unfortunately it seems like the "rules" have been created over time in an attempt to teach students of visual arts by rote. Ironically much like math students who simply memorize formulae in order to pass the next exam art students who learn the rules without the understanding of visual perception/psychology will likely never excel. And of course there are some of us who are simply hard-wired to rebel against rules of any kind unless we understand the reason for them.
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A high school photography teacher I once had taught that "There are no rules, only guidelines. The adventurous among you will learn to break the rules. I salute you." I was (and still am) a rule follower by nature, although I try to be adventurous from time to time. :)
 
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bleirer said:
I think that first shot is a good example of a stolen edge. It's a cool photo with the sense of looking off into the distance, but in terms of this topic I'm feeling like it would be even stronger if the curve did not cross right at the head of the one on the right side, if the head was a little below the curve. Of course that is my individual reaction just because the topic is tangents it has me looking for them.
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The image is also much stronger with the road in the frame than without it. Would it be stronger if the one pronghorn had stopped a step or two short of where it did, probably...but not by much.
 
Bill Ferris said:
If a person is a photographer and they want the final version of the image to be a photograph, there are limits on edits that can be done without converting the image to something other than a photograph. It's not cheating to make such edits. It just alters the kind of image being made.
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As someone that does a lot of manipulation, moving stuff around and even painting with digital brushes, I personally don't buy into the hard definition of what is a photograph and what isn't. To me it's a photo if the artist says the category of the submission is photography. If they say it is mixed media or digital or printmaking or whatever, that is their right as the artist.
 
Bill Ferris said:
The image is also much stronger with the road in the frame than without it. Would it be stronger if the one pronghorn had stopped a step or two short of where it did, probably...but not by much.
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Oh yeah, to me the road makes that photo. I just might be tempted to move it or move the animal a skooch.
 
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bleirer said:
As someone that does a lot of manipulation, moving stuff around and even painting with digital brushes, I personally don't buy into the hard definition of what is a photograph and what isn't. To me it's a photo if the artist says the category of the submission is photography. If they say it is mixed media or digital or printmaking or whatever, that is their right as the artist.
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If an artist submitted a painting or sketch as a photo, would that work be a photo?
 
Bill Ferris said:
Horizon lines and subject overlap are a couple of topics that have been raised in this interesting thread. Here's a screenshot from Sam Abell's gallery page (samabell.com) that I'm sharing to offer a different perspective.

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Abell makes brilliant use of horizon lines in his photos and they often intersect with the subject. They key, IMO, is where they intersect. In the above photo - one of his most famous - the horizon intersects with the cowboy who's squatting to castrate the bull. But the line does not directly intersect a joint. A line cutting across a person's neck, waste, or another joint gives an impression of decapitation or amputation. In this photo, the horizon line intersects just below the shoulder and does not give an impression of severing a limb.

Several subjects overlap in the photo. Importantly, however, no faces overlap. The cowboy on the horse, the two cowboys in the middle ground, the person in the foreground at left...their faces are unobstructed. We even see the horse's face and that of the cow between the red bucket and the cowboy in the middle in the foreground.

The faces we don't see are those of the animal being branded in the midground, the bull being castrated, the cowboy performing the castration and the man carrying the bucket.

I would argue those omissions strengthen the photo. If we could see the face of the animal being branded, that would demand our attention and be a distraction. The same goes for the animal being castrated. The cowboy at the center of the frame is not, himself, the subject. It's the act of castration that is, which is why the scalpel held in that man's mouth but clearly visible against his shadowed face is so important. If the scalpel weren't so prominent and we saw the cowboy's face instead, the photo wouldn't be as impactful.

The red bucket is what makes this photo so powerful. It adds color and is, itself, an equal subject. It substitutes for the blood we do not wish to see and makes clear full impact of the activity that's underway.

The one "imperfection" in the photo is the horizon line cutting through the elbow of the cowboy in the white hat and, it could be argued, even that contributes to the image. It leaves an impression of the arm being removed at the elbow. It provokes a feeling of tension or conflict in the viewer. That feeling echoes our reaction to what we're seeing: an animal's testicles being removed.

It's amazing to me that Abell managed to so (nearly) perfectly compose this photo and wait until just the right moment to press the shutter release.
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I do not see any tangents in that photo. I don't think a subject overlapping the horizon (or the hill in this case) is always a tangent. It would have to be one of those cases I mentioned in the first post, and I don't notice that.
 
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Great advice Eric, I think back to my local Photography instructor and what he said many times in our classes "you are the one who must be satisfied with the results of your work."
I have continued to learn from almost every trip out with my cameras and hope to do that until my last shot is fired off. I still get upset of some really dumb things I forget to make before I snap the shutter but in the end I see improvement in my results, "SOMETIMES".
 
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bleirer said:
This one seemed pretty good as a summary:

Avoiding Tangents: 9 Visual Blunders Every Artist Should Watch Out For - EmptyEasel.com

Have you ever been caught off-guard by a visual tangent in your art? When creating a composition there are so many different things to juggle that it's easy to miss even the obvious flaws - and that’s when tangents sneak in.
emptyeasel.com emptyeasel.com
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It's interesting that the article is written from the perspective of landscape compositions. Antlers are not a distraction in wildlife photography.

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bleirer said:
What are your thoughts on visual distractions? Are there certain types you notice more than others?
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The visual distraction that sets my teeth on edge is a kind of bokeh where you get double edges on, e.g., blades of grass or branches. This isn't an issue of composition -- it's a fault of lens design. But it is the visual analog of squeaking chalk on a blackboard for me.
 
Bill Ferris said:
It's interesting that the article is written from the perspective of landscape compositions. Antlers are not a distraction in wildlife photography.

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Antlers are more of a metaphor for the type of tangent involving objects that are not part of the subject but seem to be connected to it. But I think you knew that. In that photo I think the frame is the tangent blocking the antlers. The article I think is a good summary of some of the common distractions.
 
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bleirer said:
Antlers are more of a metaphor for the type of tangent involving objects that are not part of the subject but seem to be connected to it. But I think you knew that. In that photo I think the frame is the tangent blocking the antlers. The article I think is a good summary of some of the common distractions.
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There are always exceptions, which is where composition gets fun and interesting.
 
tclune said:
The visual distraction that sets my teeth on edge is a kind of bokeh where you get double edges on, e.g., blades of grass or branches. This isn't an issue of composition -- it's a fault of lens design. But it is the visual analog of squeaking chalk on a blackboard for me.
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I agree. I think in a sense that could be thought of as axis Alignment or split apex, where something symmetrical is mirrored on the same central axis as something else symmetrical. Usually it's move a little left or right to offset the axis, but not sure if that works with bokeh.
 
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Bill Ferris said:
There are always exceptions, which is where composition gets fun and interesting.
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I agree, and common sense always rules, but antlers on a creature that has antlers is never "antlers" or outcroppings.
 
Bokeh and contrast also seems to matter. Mostly I think the reason to avoid tangents is because the picture is flat but the world has planes and depths. When something on another plane gets flattened in the picture is can be visually ambiguous in the sense that something on another plane seems to merge with the subject plane. When the background is soft or not high contrast it seems to be less likely to feel merged with the subject.
 
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bleirer said:
Bokeh and contrast also seems to matter. Mostly I think the reason to avoid tangents is because the picture is flat but the world has planes and depths. When something on another plane gets flattened in the picture is can be visually ambiguous in the sense that something on another plane seems to merge with the subject plane. When the background is soft or not high contrast it seems to be less likely to feel merged with the subject.
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Which is the whole point of shooting wildlife/portraits at wide apertures. The concept of subject isolation is basically elimination of distractions. Shooting at wide apertures simplifies the task when it softens the BG enough to blend potentially distracting elements into an amorphous mass. This also allows our eyes/brain to interpret the flat image as 3d. IMO an ideal wildlife BG is soft enough to eliminate intersecting lines, etc, but retains enough detail to provide a sense of the environment/location(e.g. distant mountains, marsh, surf...).
 
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Cleaning up files I ran across an example for this subject. The original image below was shot in 2013. Riding down the beach and ran across this bear and cub laying in the edge of the dunes. I jumped out and this was one of the first frames I captured. I noticed the bit of stump showing behind the cubs rump and repositioned to get it out of the frame. But of course after that I couldn't get them both looking at the same time and then they repositioned themselves. Back then I was using PS Elements as my editor. It had a cloning tool but "content aware" removal wasn't yet a thing. The second image is a reworked version using content aware removal tool.

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That's a good example. To a degree the remaining verticals are also antlers, but being out of focus and low contrast they don't draw the eye much. Be interesting to see it without them though to see if it made a difference.
 
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Calson said:
If my eyes go to something other than the subject when first viewing an image then there is a negative distracting element. Usually it is something much brighter in the frame and our eyes naturally go to bright objects first. If at first glance the image lacks punch then I cull it and don't think about how to fix it in post. If also educated me on how to view a scene before taking the shot.

A friend and novice photographer visited from Taiwan and what impressed me is how he would first select the background in deciding what to photograph. No idea where he picked that up but it was a great foundation.
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That's great advice.
 
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Here's another example where I considered the bright yellow grass at bottom of frame to be distracting. It was too much to remove plus IMO it added to the scene. So I simply darkened it.

Note: if you click on the image to open the light box you can then toggle back and forth to see the difference more clearly.

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I would say the couple where the yellow touches the body would be a tangent, but those few would be easy to remove. The rest add to the scene. The other would be the diagonal log, but that would be a bear to mess with.
 
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NorthernFocus said:
Here's another example where I considered the bright yellow grass at bottom of frame to be distracting. It was too much to remove plus IMO it added to the scene. So I simply darkened it.
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Agreed. The grass is an environmental element that adds to the story of where the photo was made. It's more the brightness of the grass in the original image than the presence or overlapping of grass that pulled the viewers attention away from the owl. Darkening the grass addressed that.
 
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