By the Numbers

By The Numbers
By the numbers is a way to describe a numerical rule of my own imagining, the rule of tenths.                              Fine art prints available

My eye is always in the sky whenever I’m outside. I suppose that’s a side effect of being a landscape photographer. It’s my opinion that clouds are fifty percent of what makes an image interesting. That’s a generalization and there are exceptions to every rule, but ninety percent of the time, clouds are fifty percent of the picture; photography by the numbers.

More cloudscapes from the gallery

Of course I’m being a little facetious, art cannot be divided and multiplied. At least I don’t think so. But I think art gives inspiration to ideas like mathematical theories. It’s a side effect of how we work. We look at something abstract and try to make sense of it. We look at clouds and each see something different. I think abstractions give our subconscious an opportunity to communicate with our conscious selfs, only we don’t realize it so we call it “sub-conscious”, one of life’s little ironies.

Back to the math. In photography we have something called the rule of thirds. Dividing the subjects on boundaries of one-third makes and image more interesting, so they say. Some of my images, like this, are a little more extreme. I’ll call it my rule of tenths. One-tenth of stuff on the bottom and nine-tenths of abstract at the top. That way, my sub-conscious has more room. It’s just a theory mind you, but you never know, I could be on to something.