The Concept of Rhythm in Photography

When it comes to photography, rhythm is a key element that can make or break an image. The concept of rhythm refers to the repetition, pattern, and harmony that can create interest and depth in a photograph. In this article, we'll delve into the world of rhythm in photography and explore its various aspects.

Tempo in Photography

One aspect of rhythm in photography is tempo, which refers to the speed or pacing of an image. A slower tempo can create a more contemplative atmosphere, while a faster tempo can convey energy and dynamism. However, as we discussed earlier, this concept will be explored in a separate episode due to its personal significance for the speaker.

Density and Rhythm

Another aspect of rhythm in photography is density, which refers to the amount of information or elements present in an image. A dense image can create a sense of chaos, while a sparse image can create a sense of calm. The speaker suggests that varying the speed and density of these elements can create different rhythms in an image.

The Importance of Repetition

Repetition is another key element of rhythm in photography. When repeating elements such as shapes, colors, or patterns, photographers can create a sense of unity and cohesion in their images. This repetition can also be used to draw the viewer's attention to specific areas of the image.

The Role of Objects in Creating Rhythm

In some photographs, objects play a crucial role in creating rhythm. For example, when multiple objects are arranged in a harmonious composition, they can create a sense of balance and order. This is evident in the works of photographers such as Hannah Starkey, who uses groupings of figures to create interesting rhythms.

Composition and Rhythm

The way a photograph is composed also plays a role in creating rhythm. The use of leading lines, framing, and other compositional techniques can guide the viewer's eye through an image and create a sense of movement or energy. This is evident in the works of photographers such as Avedon, who uses the hair of his subjects to create dynamic rhythms.

Rhythm in Contemporary Photography

Contemporary photography also employs rhythm in various ways. For example, Hannah Starkey's use of repetition and pattern creates interesting rhythms that draw the viewer's eye through her images. Her use of mirrors and reflections also creates a sense of depth and complexity in her photographs.

The Power of Motion and Activity

In some photographs, motion and activity are used to create rhythm. Avedon's portrait of Twiggy is a great example of this. The hair in the image is dynamic and moving, creating a sense of energy and dynamism that draws the viewer in.

Conclusion

Rhythm is a powerful element in photography that can make or break an image. By understanding and employing various techniques such as repetition, density, tempo, composition, and motion, photographers can create images that are visually interesting and engaging. Whether it's creating a sense of calm or energy, rhythm is essential to making a photograph work.

The Art of Photography TV

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneverybody it's time once again for another episode of the art of photography my name is ted forbes welcome back to the show and today we're continuing on in our compositional series our subject for today is rhythm now the last bunch of episodes that we did we had our rule series where we had rule thirds rule of odds rule space and basically these rules or techniques that you know if you apply this certain technique whatever that rule is that you'll achieve this visual effect and it's up for you as the photographer to determine whether that's right or not for the composition you're going for so whether it's something you want to use or something you want to avoid and starting with today with rhythm we're talking about now conceptual they're really not rules at all they exist and so any composition you're going to have some kind of rhythm to it and I think these are the kinds of things that if you can learn to pay attention to them they're going to improve your skills as a photographer in your compositional sense dramatically and you know how many of us have been out shooting or we're shooting an event or shooting something going on and we come back and we have some okay shots and they weren't quite right and I think rhythm and we're gonna talk about tempo these you know kind of have musical metaphors to go with them but there's certain things that if you can learn how to control them somewhat I think you're going to have better luck in getting more accurate more interesting you know your compositional sense is going to improve drastically so I think the best way to talk about this is let's go to the computer and let's look at some images and today we're going to talk about rhythm and composition so in terms of rhythm and I want to speak to the metaphor that you know visual art the metaphoric connection the visual art has to music because I think it's more obvious in music than it is in visual art sometimes I mean we see things in a certain way but I think the level of abstraction that we can comprehend visually is much greater than what we can typically comprehend as far as music goes when music it's really sloppy it gets very maybe offensive to the ear very dissonant and very difficult to deal with but if we think about rhythm and music and think about something it's like a drum beat you know you have a series of pulses that your brain interprets they're some of them are equidistant apart there's some kind of backbone that keeps that in some kind of continuity that we hear and then other pulses kind of come in over-the-top to counter that and if you kind of consider some of these pulses like objects and visual composition I think you can really start to draw a metaphor or a very strong connection between you know visual art and music and artists photography and I have some examples here you know one thing that you know if you look at the Carl Blas felt which is a very beautiful photograph very organic very speaks very much of a nature there's a you know there's a strong pattern that's going on here with the six spirals that you see and it you know it's fairly easy to comprehend and this is kind of straight ahead rhythm it's very balanced it's very even you know you're going to find stuff like this in a lot of musical types like maybe classical music where rhythms tend to be straight ahead you know in rhythm also goes along with melody sometimes and so you can see how just the placement of these objects and then the way that they're turned or the way they work together you know you kind of have a melody that counters it and I hope this isn't getting too metaphysical on you but you know stuff like that adds a certain amount of congruity to it now another thing in music that we deal with with rhythm is what's known as syncopation and this is where basically you have rhythms that start to counter or pull against or pull away from the main pulse this becomes syncopated and it starts to make it feel less natural than it was originally but it still works like you find this a lot in jazz music or even you know in modern rock music there's a lot of syncopation to it if you take an image like the Richard Avedon which is a very strange image to say the least with these women who appear to have extremely long necks and they're bubbling out of something I don't know it's it's it's quite a wild image but one thing that makes this work is it does have you know some of that you know similarity to the bloss felt in terms of you know you've got a structure you have in this case five heads instead of six but this one's more syncopated it starts to work a little bit off the scale and off the beat a little bit and he does that with the scale and the fact that not everybody is on the same plane so you see some of the heads are further away plus the subjects just bizarre so that's you know I think one thing to you know kind of consider is how the syncopation in an image like this differs from something like the Blas felt where it's more straight ahead you could make the argument that the boss felt is slightly syncopated because of the way that these spirals are turned it just adds a nice harmonious Beauty to it but you know you really start to see stronger syncopation in other other places you know another thing I think of like you take an extreme image this is also Richard Avedon this was one of the later portraits he's known for this is a portrait of a beekeeper which is almost a disturbing image but in probably one of Avedon's particularly for his later period best-known works because it's so discomforting maybe to look at to this guy with bees all over him apparently he's not getting stung but you have certainly this mess of a rhythm that's displacing you know you've got this guy who's extremely pale this odd-looking bald man with huge ears he's covered in bees and this weird pattern of these little I mean you couldn't tell if he had one it'd be hard to tell it was a bee but he you know but the fact that you have this grouping of them and the fact that you know there was no arrangement to this it just naturally happened but there's a lot of you know dissonant syncopation that's going on in something like this because there's so much activity that's going on so a rhythm in this image it's going to be much more full much more lavish when maybe not lavage but much more much more intense I guess than something that is just a handful of objects that are placed in a certain way so something to consider in composition to try to vary this up and I think your range is a photographer and what you're capable of doing visually you know a lot of that is going to speak from how you handle rhythm components in your images so speak I think another interesting example is this is a contemporary photographer Brian David Griffith who I think is one of the up-and-coming guys to watch he's just these amazing photos I originally saw a print of this it was printed as a Palladium on some kind of rice based tissue paper and it was just beautiful because it's kind of a high key image to begin with and it's obviously a figure descending up some stairs there's some focus issues with the image but that's part of the artistic quality but it's so minimalist that really all you make out is the the figure moving or ascending the staircase zoom not descending and then the outlines of the the two forms that make up the stairs and so something like this the rhythm is slowed down immensely there's there's very little activity going on and it has a certain effect there's no right or wrong way to implore rhythm in your composition I think this is one extreme where as the beekeepers another the rhythm is very slow in this one the beekeeper is very fast and frantic now we're going to talk about tempo in a separate episode because I kind of have a personal definition it's a little different for that but in terms of rhythm you know you can vary the speed in the density that's going on and I think that you know density is something you know to think about another image and actually have a bigger one of this this is a wonderful image great civil rights photographer Ernest withers let me pull up a bigger one that I opened up and you can see that there's a great amount of rhythm that makes up this composition these are protesters during the civil rights movement that are holding up signs that say I am a man and you see an enormous amount of repetition an enormous amount of rhythm this is not as scattered and crazy as say the bees had the effect of in that other image this is a little more in sync it's a little more predictable it's a little more harmonious and less dissonant but still dense at the same time there's there's a lot going on but because you see that repetition so the other thing that I want you to take note of is the use of repetition to define rhythm all these images that I'm showing you now with the exception of the escalator or the person descending the stairs they're like objects that are working together okay so another two images I want to show you real quick this is Hannah Starkey who's a contemporary photographer and I think she's just got such a beautiful eye for composition these are untitled works these are women standing next to a wall but you see and think back to when we were talking about you know groupings of threes or odd numbers the rule of odds well there's not an odd number going on here and it doesn't really even work out like that but the image still works because the rhythm is interesting you have a solo figure over here you have a group of three over there well if you consider them two groups you end up with two so that's not an odd number and therefore people total so that really didn't work out either technically there are seven because there's these three figures that are carved into the stone but it works well there's a really nice rhythm and I think your eye is directed and kind of guided through this piece I tend when I see this I tend to drift towards the woman with the red dress in the front first and my naturally leads over to the other women and who knows what they're thinking or what they're saying or I you know I don't know the story behind this image another one this is also Hannah Starkey that I think is just beautiful is this woman in a mirror she's touching the mirror and there's a woman getting her scowling look in the reflection but despite the potentially uneasy nature of what's going on or what story is being told here this is a beautiful composition in the way that it leads your eye from the right side of the frame to the left and it does this with rhythm and pacing you have the repetition of this woman who sees herself in the mirror and they're touching that starts to give you the repetition and leads straight over to this other woman and completes the story or the picture if you want to look at that so anyway another great rhythmic concept and then finally one of the great another great Avedon images this is a portrait of Twiggy who was a supermodel in her day 1968 and the way the hair moves in this it's outrageous it's Fantasia like it's it brings a lot of interest but it's the rhythm in this is all done with the hair and there's an enormous amount of activity this is not a sharp image there's a lot of motion going on and I think this is also a great example where you don't have to have everything exactly in focus to create interest and I think that's what's going on here is there's a lot of motion and a lot of activity so anyway just some some thoughts on rhythm rhythm can be pretty broad a there's you know different people are going to have different definitions of how this works but for me what I look for is repetition syncopation you know the kinds of things that are going to create interest compositionally and a lot of this just comes down to you know learning to see look through the viewfinder learning to wait for a better moment learning how to frame things up learning to figure out what you need to do to get a better image and rhythmic pacing is a lot of what goes into that for me personally so anyway if you get any questions or anything make sure you check us out on Facebook hit me up on Twitter whatever your social media of choice is you can also visit our website which is the art of photography TV and appreciate you watching we'll see you next timeeverybody it's time once again for another episode of the art of photography my name is ted forbes welcome back to the show and today we're continuing on in our compositional series our subject for today is rhythm now the last bunch of episodes that we did we had our rule series where we had rule thirds rule of odds rule space and basically these rules or techniques that you know if you apply this certain technique whatever that rule is that you'll achieve this visual effect and it's up for you as the photographer to determine whether that's right or not for the composition you're going for so whether it's something you want to use or something you want to avoid and starting with today with rhythm we're talking about now conceptual they're really not rules at all they exist and so any composition you're going to have some kind of rhythm to it and I think these are the kinds of things that if you can learn to pay attention to them they're going to improve your skills as a photographer in your compositional sense dramatically and you know how many of us have been out shooting or we're shooting an event or shooting something going on and we come back and we have some okay shots and they weren't quite right and I think rhythm and we're gonna talk about tempo these you know kind of have musical metaphors to go with them but there's certain things that if you can learn how to control them somewhat I think you're going to have better luck in getting more accurate more interesting you know your compositional sense is going to improve drastically so I think the best way to talk about this is let's go to the computer and let's look at some images and today we're going to talk about rhythm and composition so in terms of rhythm and I want to speak to the metaphor that you know visual art the metaphoric connection the visual art has to music because I think it's more obvious in music than it is in visual art sometimes I mean we see things in a certain way but I think the level of abstraction that we can comprehend visually is much greater than what we can typically comprehend as far as music goes when music it's really sloppy it gets very maybe offensive to the ear very dissonant and very difficult to deal with but if we think about rhythm and music and think about something it's like a drum beat you know you have a series of pulses that your brain interprets they're some of them are equidistant apart there's some kind of backbone that keeps that in some kind of continuity that we hear and then other pulses kind of come in over-the-top to counter that and if you kind of consider some of these pulses like objects and visual composition I think you can really start to draw a metaphor or a very strong connection between you know visual art and music and artists photography and I have some examples here you know one thing that you know if you look at the Carl Blas felt which is a very beautiful photograph very organic very speaks very much of a nature there's a you know there's a strong pattern that's going on here with the six spirals that you see and it you know it's fairly easy to comprehend and this is kind of straight ahead rhythm it's very balanced it's very even you know you're going to find stuff like this in a lot of musical types like maybe classical music where rhythms tend to be straight ahead you know in rhythm also goes along with melody sometimes and so you can see how just the placement of these objects and then the way that they're turned or the way they work together you know you kind of have a melody that counters it and I hope this isn't getting too metaphysical on you but you know stuff like that adds a certain amount of congruity to it now another thing in music that we deal with with rhythm is what's known as syncopation and this is where basically you have rhythms that start to counter or pull against or pull away from the main pulse this becomes syncopated and it starts to make it feel less natural than it was originally but it still works like you find this a lot in jazz music or even you know in modern rock music there's a lot of syncopation to it if you take an image like the Richard Avedon which is a very strange image to say the least with these women who appear to have extremely long necks and they're bubbling out of something I don't know it's it's it's quite a wild image but one thing that makes this work is it does have you know some of that you know similarity to the bloss felt in terms of you know you've got a structure you have in this case five heads instead of six but this one's more syncopated it starts to work a little bit off the scale and off the beat a little bit and he does that with the scale and the fact that not everybody is on the same plane so you see some of the heads are further away plus the subjects just bizarre so that's you know I think one thing to you know kind of consider is how the syncopation in an image like this differs from something like the Blas felt where it's more straight ahead you could make the argument that the boss felt is slightly syncopated because of the way that these spirals are turned it just adds a nice harmonious Beauty to it but you know you really start to see stronger syncopation in other other places you know another thing I think of like you take an extreme image this is also Richard Avedon this was one of the later portraits he's known for this is a portrait of a beekeeper which is almost a disturbing image but in probably one of Avedon's particularly for his later period best-known works because it's so discomforting maybe to look at to this guy with bees all over him apparently he's not getting stung but you have certainly this mess of a rhythm that's displacing you know you've got this guy who's extremely pale this odd-looking bald man with huge ears he's covered in bees and this weird pattern of these little I mean you couldn't tell if he had one it'd be hard to tell it was a bee but he you know but the fact that you have this grouping of them and the fact that you know there was no arrangement to this it just naturally happened but there's a lot of you know dissonant syncopation that's going on in something like this because there's so much activity that's going on so a rhythm in this image it's going to be much more full much more lavish when maybe not lavage but much more much more intense I guess than something that is just a handful of objects that are placed in a certain way so something to consider in composition to try to vary this up and I think your range is a photographer and what you're capable of doing visually you know a lot of that is going to speak from how you handle rhythm components in your images so speak I think another interesting example is this is a contemporary photographer Brian David Griffith who I think is one of the up-and-coming guys to watch he's just these amazing photos I originally saw a print of this it was printed as a Palladium on some kind of rice based tissue paper and it was just beautiful because it's kind of a high key image to begin with and it's obviously a figure descending up some stairs there's some focus issues with the image but that's part of the artistic quality but it's so minimalist that really all you make out is the the figure moving or ascending the staircase zoom not descending and then the outlines of the the two forms that make up the stairs and so something like this the rhythm is slowed down immensely there's there's very little activity going on and it has a certain effect there's no right or wrong way to implore rhythm in your composition I think this is one extreme where as the beekeepers another the rhythm is very slow in this one the beekeeper is very fast and frantic now we're going to talk about tempo in a separate episode because I kind of have a personal definition it's a little different for that but in terms of rhythm you know you can vary the speed in the density that's going on and I think that you know density is something you know to think about another image and actually have a bigger one of this this is a wonderful image great civil rights photographer Ernest withers let me pull up a bigger one that I opened up and you can see that there's a great amount of rhythm that makes up this composition these are protesters during the civil rights movement that are holding up signs that say I am a man and you see an enormous amount of repetition an enormous amount of rhythm this is not as scattered and crazy as say the bees had the effect of in that other image this is a little more in sync it's a little more predictable it's a little more harmonious and less dissonant but still dense at the same time there's there's a lot going on but because you see that repetition so the other thing that I want you to take note of is the use of repetition to define rhythm all these images that I'm showing you now with the exception of the escalator or the person descending the stairs they're like objects that are working together okay so another two images I want to show you real quick this is Hannah Starkey who's a contemporary photographer and I think she's just got such a beautiful eye for composition these are untitled works these are women standing next to a wall but you see and think back to when we were talking about you know groupings of threes or odd numbers the rule of odds well there's not an odd number going on here and it doesn't really even work out like that but the image still works because the rhythm is interesting you have a solo figure over here you have a group of three over there well if you consider them two groups you end up with two so that's not an odd number and therefore people total so that really didn't work out either technically there are seven because there's these three figures that are carved into the stone but it works well there's a really nice rhythm and I think your eye is directed and kind of guided through this piece I tend when I see this I tend to drift towards the woman with the red dress in the front first and my naturally leads over to the other women and who knows what they're thinking or what they're saying or I you know I don't know the story behind this image another one this is also Hannah Starkey that I think is just beautiful is this woman in a mirror she's touching the mirror and there's a woman getting her scowling look in the reflection but despite the potentially uneasy nature of what's going on or what story is being told here this is a beautiful composition in the way that it leads your eye from the right side of the frame to the left and it does this with rhythm and pacing you have the repetition of this woman who sees herself in the mirror and they're touching that starts to give you the repetition and leads straight over to this other woman and completes the story or the picture if you want to look at that so anyway another great rhythmic concept and then finally one of the great another great Avedon images this is a portrait of Twiggy who was a supermodel in her day 1968 and the way the hair moves in this it's outrageous it's Fantasia like it's it brings a lot of interest but it's the rhythm in this is all done with the hair and there's an enormous amount of activity this is not a sharp image there's a lot of motion going on and I think this is also a great example where you don't have to have everything exactly in focus to create interest and I think that's what's going on here is there's a lot of motion and a lot of activity so anyway just some some thoughts on rhythm rhythm can be pretty broad a there's you know different people are going to have different definitions of how this works but for me what I look for is repetition syncopation you know the kinds of things that are going to create interest compositionally and a lot of this just comes down to you know learning to see look through the viewfinder learning to wait for a better moment learning how to frame things up learning to figure out what you need to do to get a better image and rhythmic pacing is a lot of what goes into that for me personally so anyway if you get any questions or anything make sure you check us out on Facebook hit me up on Twitter whatever your social media of choice is you can also visit our website which is the art of photography TV and appreciate you watching we'll see you next time\n"