Arnie always says that I can leave out information in a photography and still make it read right. Well, so can he!
You do not always need the full scene or the full object in a photograph, to wit the four examples here where your eye and your imagination fill in the rest.
Is there any question in your mind where these lines continue? Can you envision what the photograph would have looked like if Arnie had included the whole sweep of the building? Probably a lot less dramatic.
He left just enough in to allow your imagination to fill in the blanks, yet enough to set off the stormy sky. And it was stormy that day in the Alhambra. Rain. Buckets of it. But it did not dampen our enthusiasm for this amazing location.
In fact, during one of those deluges, I ducked for cover, not far from where Arnie did the photograph above. At first, it was pretty dark, but then the skies lightened and there was some wonderful, natural-fill light coming in from the open “arena” that lit up my scene.
I tend to be attracted to scenes where elements fold over one another. This image immediately grabbed me; there was no other possible composition for me, and I clicked the shutter just once.
Any further efforts to compose the scene differently just didn’t work for me, and I happily …