Looking for Patterns

There are two kinds of photographs I love — very complex photos and very minimal photos. I also like everything in between, but I love very complex and very simple. Looking at a tangle of branches, vines, plants, or enjoying the complex moving patterns of sun on water are two examples of complex.

You will notice with my photograph of snowy branches, your eyes move around and take in the entire image as a cohesive whole. The point here is the pattern, not necessarily the subject itself. There is no one element fighting for dominance. The spaces not occupied by a branch or a tree trunk are pretty uniform in size and evenly spaced throughout the entire image.

On the complete opposite end of the scale, we have the image where, indeed, the main subject is immediately very obvious and it’s the unused blank areas (the negative space), that lend emphasis to the subject itself because the subject is what you immediately see. As in my image of thorns in snow, your eyes follow the subject from left to right and there is a sense of movement “forward”. There’s a visual “loop” your brain follows unlike in the complex branch image where your brain takes in the entire image as a whole.

Below are two more examples, one complex (though minimal in subject matter) and one simple and minimal in content. I really cannot pick a favorite “style”, so I like to play with both.

Looking for pattern images requires you to shut down part of your brain and try to just process what you’re observing. Instead of “tree branches”, try to think of the word “pattern”, or in this case, “tangle”. Looking for minimal images, try to find things that are isolated in their environment without a lot of peripheral clutter to distract from the subject.

These are simplistic and basic explanations, of course, but I hope they may give you some ideas to think about while you’re out and about with your camera, or if you’re just looking for some interesting thing to shoot with your smart phone camera.


For more of my photography, please visit:
https://mary-bedy.pixels.com

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