In the last podcast, we discussed how Promised Closure was an important element of Dynamic Symmetry both in composition of the original photo and probably even more important in post-production.

In this podcast, we will review another abstraction related to Dynamic Symmetry, namely how our minds process sensory data and create meaning. 

For more than 2500 years, Buddhism has taught that our natural tendency is to equate meaning from most every stimulus.   To complicate matters, we create layer upon layer of story from a lifetime of stimuli, that story being highly influenced by personal experience as well as the society and culture in which we live.  To pick a somewhat obscure example, in the West, pure white clothing is equated with youth and innocence.  In India, women who wear white sarees may be assumed to be widows.  

So how does all of this fit into dynamic symmetry and why is it important to photography? 

Because we are that part of society that helps it see itself, and in turn perhaps to better understand our self.  As photographers, we act in the capacity as the modern day shaman, the one who historically “saw” visions and who acted as a medium for transformation.  

To successfully reflect back to society, we either must have a highly innate understanding of our collective vision or we must learn the tools of the craft.  For those of us who want to utilize these tools in a more sophisticated way, we must try to see how certain factors influence how we create meaning from our environment.

For example, when we feel heat, we are not conscious of the nerves triggering in our skin.  Likewise, when one hears a loved one speak, we do not sense our eardrums vibrating. The brain provides meaning to those sensations and interpretation for our consciousness and sub-consciousness.  Many factors also affect our interpretation, including past experiences, beliefs and values, mood, age, and health. I remember going with friends to see “Rent,” the Broadway play.  At the time, I was angry about a completely different issue.  So while the play was a hit for everyone else, I hardly remembered anything of substance. 

What is most amazing to me is that there is any commonality at all in response for a group of individuals to any specific stimulus.  Then again, perhaps it is the nature of society and culture that gives us the common palate by which to judge and create meaning.

To provide some theoretical framework to all of this chaos, the Gestalt school of psychology documented several principles of perceptual organization. 

The main idea to Gestalt psychology is that we perceive the world in organized ways. Patterns take precedence over elements and have meaning not present in the individual pieces. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

In like manner, viewers see our photographs as the sum of individual elements. Too often, the photographer or retoucher can become intrigued or fascinated by a particular portion of the image and miss how others will see the entire image.  The job of both photographer and retoucher is frequently to simplify the image, so that viewers will have an easier job to see elements within the whole, and in doing so, spend more time with each image.

At first it seems counterintuitive, but one way to simplify an image is to eliminate a portion of the main story, because we know that the viewer will create meaning from partial or limited data. For example, we mentally know that there is an entire human being, even though only a portion of the person is captured inside the frame. 

We also have a tendency to mentally create smooth contours from incomplete or irregular contours.  When the distance between individual elements is substantially less than the characteristic dimension of the element itself, the elements will appear to us as lines.  Similarly, the human mind can create shapes from separate elements, depending upon their size, focus, luminance, color and contrast.

Nature has also influenced how we interpret elements and indeed how we shape our world. Certain shapes and proportions recur: triangles, rectangles, circles, and others. Proportions of the human body also play a major role in how we create meaning from pieces of data. Those proportions have endured over time and formed the habitat in many different ages and cultures ranging from Renaissance Europe, Tang dynasty China, early Egypt, pre-Columbian Latin America, and ancient Greece and Rome.

We know that the number 1.618 describes Nature's growth spiral; some refer to it as the  Golden Section.

In the 6th Century BCE, Pythagoras derived that the Golden Section could be defined as when the smaller of two elements is to the larger as the larger is to the sum or a/b = b/(a+b).  If we convert this to percentages, the Golden mean criteria is met when the smaller size is about 38% and the larger 61.8% of the whole. 

The pine cone and sunflower are ideal natural models to study the basis of dynamic symmetry as are many of the proportions of the human anatomy.
 
Because most photography isn’t rigorous composed, an approximation to that theory was formulated, which most of us know as Rule of Thirds. 

Let’s stop here for this podcast on Dynamic Symmetry with one last caveat.  Dynamic symmetry and the Golden mean are not 'short cuts' to creativity. Studying and understanding these tools hopefully enables us to visualize ideas that otherwise would have missed entirely, because of our tendency to focus on the whole.  As artisans, our job is to create that whole from separate elements that make sense across a range of cultures and personal experiences.