Perception and Imaging – The Book

To start, I recommend this book to all novice-intermediate photographers who need to know what to photograph and why, like myself. It’s an invaluable book that will affect my photographs for the rest of my life. Here are my reasons.

First, however, I must make it clear that, while the content of the book is highly relevant to photography, it isn’t necessarily a photography book.  To me the book is beyond photography. The book showed me photography as a branch of the broader form of art – visual art, which has existed thousands of years earlier than photograph – and all the knowledge and concepts that our ancestors have developed and derived are applicable to the imaging process of photography. It was really an eye-opener for me, a humble software engineer.

Pretty much all the concepts in the books are new to me, yet I grasped them pretty well without encountering any circular references. That’s another powerful part of this book. The author has been a prof for several decades and the concepts were explained with the most primitive words and examples, yet the concepts are not. The book covers and references ideas from photographers, painters, philosophers, and even psychiatrists. This really illustrated how photographs, and in a broader sense, visual images, can be understood and analyzed from many different perspectives and levels. At the lowest level you can explain visual effects with psychological theories, and at a higher level you can express your philosophies with cunningly designed images. Other concepts and theories are somewhere in the middle.

Oddly enough, I think  this book doesn’t guarantee good photographs, but gives you a good set of tools and techniques to teach yourself and eventually get there. Some people commented they want to see rule of 1/3 and such but disappointed they couldn’t find them in the book. I want to argue that rule of 1/3 is really a rule of thumb, an approximation, a simplified principle that is easy to follow for amateurs – very soon you need to break it, and this book can tell you when and how, because it deals with perception and imaging at a much lower level without explicitly mentioning it. You should be able to construct higher level concepts from lower level ones, that’s the true power of this book.

Moreover, thanks to its generic approach to the visual perception and imaging, I think the concepts are applicable to all disciplines that use a visual display as the medium. In my case, it’s the graphical user interface design. GUI designs are essentially compositions of smaller visual elements, and how the whole picture is perceived follows the same rules as other visual arts. The figure-ground relationships that highlight critical information, the colors that make key things pop and affect user’s emotions, and the layouts that form and break gestalt groupings of certain elements, all contribute to a good GUI design. In fact, I’ve encountered, in several other GUI design specific books, the same concepts as ones discussed in this book which served as validations of the applicability of these theories in other disciplines.

I think this books deserves more publicity and acknowledgment among photographers. I am recommending this book to all my friends who own DSLR and who I think are pursuing photography as a form of fine art.