The viewer’s imagination exceeds the beauty of reality.

I recently imagined that it must be beneficial to our images if we let the viewer fill in the “gaps” that we deliberately leave.

We can improve our photographs by purposely excluding elements, just as we can enhance nudity by leaving some things to the mind’s eye.

Engage the Viewer

Engage your audience on a level that spikes their interest without spilling the whole bucket in front of their feet!

We need to draw the viewer into our pictures and guide them towards the most interesting parts of the picture, by means of visual aids, such as shadows, lines, wavy curves or suggested lines (the viewing angle of a person in the picture, movement towards a point of interest).

Once the viewer has absorbed the image, we can leave some things for his imagination, giving him/her a chance to engage emotionally with the images by interpreting the images differently. A single image can have a different meaning to each person.

We can captivate our audience by stimulating their visual senses with our art and leading them towards a certain feeling we want to transpire. Eventually we have to trust our audience to interpret an image, some of whom may have a greater imagination than we do. We must not limit their experience to our own imagination or confine it by reality.

Examples

Instead of dealing with the large dynamic range of some images by means of HDR, we can simply choose to crop the image to reduce the dynamic range dramatically. When you take photographs of waterfalls, you do not have to show the upper edge, which tends to create a very strong and unpleasing cut in our images and often leads to blown out highlights. A tighter vertical crop will often produce pleasing results. Everyone knows how the top of a fall looks like. Our minds will thus fill the gap and often do a better job at it than reality.

We can deliberately choose to blow out highlights in indoor/outdoor scenes. I am imagining a scene of our model (partner, child, professional) looking outside from within a dark room. Most of such images would suffer from too much detail outside. We could rather have the model look into the light from the dark room and create a much stronger interplay of light and shadow. This form of abstraction leaves many questions open for the viewer to answer. Why is the model looking outside? What is going on outside? What causes the expression on our models face? What would you see looking outside your window right now? We immediately identify with our model and see ourselves as a part of the image. We connect more closely to an image we can imagine ourselves to be a part of.

Now imagine we would reveal the outdoor part of our image, by carefully constructing an HDR image.

A large part of our audience will not live in a similar environment. Immediately we put up a barrier for them to identify themselves with our picture. They become observers (voyeurs) instead of participants.

Or, instead of cramming an entire skyscraper into our viewfinder, we could simply shoot a vertical image of the first 10 floors. The viewer is likely to imagine a skyscraper that exceeds the dimensions of the real building. Including a subject looking upwards and bending way back, with their hands shielding the eyes from the sun will significantly enhance the perception of the buildings real size.

Such visual cues are much more effective at guiding people but not restricting their imagination.

Conclusion

Enhancing composition by simplification is another tool at our disposal (and subject of a later essay), but deliberately leaving out elements or cutting highlights to hide elements of our image is a new concept for me as well. It will require some trial and error and maybe some chance results for us to become the true photo ninja’s we strive to be. It never hurts to explore and to keep an open mind to something new.

I am sure you can find many examples where showing less can enhance our images.

Feel free to share them below. I love learning from you as well and I get a lot of inspiration from comments.

This article is part of a larger series on becoming better photographers. Sign up for my feed to get supplied with the latest articles.