Category: The psychology of photography

  • Developing the Photographer’s Eye

    Developing the Photographer’s Eye

    Photography is a highly effective form of visual communication. You could consider your lens is your third eye, but how do you learn to see better and translate your visual skills to your camera? Having good eyesight helps, but understanding eyesight can help even more.

  • Photography and the collective unconscious

    Photography and the collective unconscious

    The Collective Unconscious The Collective Unconscious is a concept in psychoanalysis that claims there is a level of consciousness in the human species that operates below the level of individual consciousness. The Collective Unconscious kind of drives the species forward in a massive, silent group-think. Some believe we can connect to The Collective Unconscious when […]

  • Like riding a bike – How Different Brain Areas Help You Take Photos

    Like riding a bike – How Different Brain Areas Help You Take Photos

    Walnut & Broccoli Salad If you remove the hair and skull from the back of your head and used 2 mirrors and a strong torch, you might be able to see your cerebellum, just below your walnut. And if you got someone else to split your head down the middle (so that both sides have […]

  • Mastering Depth Perception

    Mastering Depth Perception

    This is an ironic thing for you to be reading because while you are reading this you are using very little depth perception – everything in your field of attention is at the same distance away. The task of reading this doesn’t require any depth perception. When you look at a photograph the same is […]

  • Face perception

    Face perception

    Aaargh! Faces are everywhere! Look deep into this glacier ice close-up photograph. How many faces you can see? Face perception is thought to be a skill we are born with, faces play a huge role in our survival, so we have a part of the brain dedicated to recognising faces… the Fusiform Gyrus. If you […]

  • The Photographer’s Genie – What drives our Passion for Photography?

    The Photographer’s Genie – What drives our Passion for Photography?

    Are we responsible for being creative? Or does creativity come from forces outside of our creative consciousness?

  • Critique

    Critique

    Give and receive critique Spending time critiquing other photographer’s work is the best way to fast track your photography when you’re not taking photos.Being able to recognise a good photo does not necessarily mean that you will be able to take a good photograph, but if you can’t recognise a good photograph, you have no […]

  • Visual processing – from eye to understanding

    Visual processing – from eye to understanding

    Light entering the eye and being processed by the visual areas of the brain is a fascinating journey. Some of the brain functions are only just being discovered and very little is really understood. The subject can become incredibly complicated, so I hope to simplify things and not get caught up in technical terms. But […]

  • Left brain versus right brain

    Left brain versus right brain

    Our brains have many parts, but most of us are familiar with the the walnut shaped outer part.  This part is called the Neo-Cortex (New Cortex) and is thought to be responsible for some of our more sophisticated skills such as ‘language’ and ‘music’.  Just like a walnut, the cortex can be divided, revealing quite […]

  • Photography and visual impairment.

    Photography and visual impairment.

    When I started my website several years ago, amidst all the learning about HTML and style-sheets, learning how to tackle the issues of cross-browser compatibility, I was faced with another challenge – Website accessibility. I had to learn to make my photography website accessible to people with disabilities, people with visual impairments, blind visitors. In […]

  • Photography as Communication

    Photography as Communication

    If you have communication in mind when you take the picture, then your photograph will have a communication value. This article discusses photography as communication.