Project 52 Week 5

[billtils]

This has been waiting for my attention since I shot it around 7am at St Monans when I was out for a soft light shot of the harbour, but hadn't checked on the tide, which was well and truly out.

While passing the time waiting for the Harbour master to turn up I noticed this fellow shuffling down to the Office (he had no shoes, just socks) and I fired off this. I knew nothing about the individual and chose to be discrete. According to the Harbour master he is a resident at a local authority sheltered house and odd but harmless.


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[DanK]

I like this image, but I think I would crop tighter, leaving more space in front than in back.

As you probably know, there is a lot posted about many people preferring images that go from left to right. Some people argue that this is because most of us are in cultures where people read from left to right. (I've never seen a study that tests this. Would be simple to do: have people who read left-to-right languages and people who read right-to-left languages, like Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew, pick their preferred images from pairs.) I don't know that I always have that response, but you might flip this image and see if you prefer it that way.

[billtils]

Thanks Dan. I agree with the crop suggestion and also the implied scepticism on the automatic implementation of the left to right view. I'm busy just now but will try to get back to this soon.

[Manfred M]

I like this image, but I think I would crop tighter, leaving more space in front than in back.

As you probably know, there is a lot posted about many people preferring images that go from left to right. Some people argue that this is because most of us are in cultures where people read from left to right. (I've never seen a study that tests this. Would be simple to do: have people who read left-to-right languages and people who read right-to-left languages, like Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew, pick their preferred images from pairs.) I don't know that I always have that response, but you might flip this image and see if you prefer it that way.

Actually there is a lot of evidence that this is not true. Work started by the Soviet era psychologist Alfred Yarbus suggests this is 100% not true. This work was started in the 1950s and 1960s and my understanding is that his work has been refined by others. Yarbus showed his subjects pictures and then used cameras to track eye movement.


1. Yarbus's Setup





2. Yarbus's finding






Just to complicate things a bit more, while many languages are written from left to right there are others that go right to left, with some going horizontally (Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, Urdu, etc.) and others vertically (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Japanese). That works out to a significant percentage of the world's population (getting close to 30%).

So while I see this left to right concept quite often, the data does not back it up.

[DanK]

Yes, I mentioned Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi. However, I think we may be talking about different things. What I have encountered is assertions about preferences, not about differences in saccades. There is a bunch of stuff posted on the web about these preferences, but it's a hodge-podge of unsupported ideas and research that is off track for this purpose, like this: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27154.

I find that I personally often find that left-to-right images feel more balanced, but I've only attended to this in a few cases. Whether it's a general pattern or not, sometimes it's worth flipping the image to see if the reversed one is more pleasing.

[Manfred M]

Yes, I mentioned Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi. However, I think we may be talking about different things. What I have encountered is assertions about preferences, not about differences in saccades. There is a bunch of stuff posted on the web about these preferences, but it's a hodge-podge of unsupported ideas and research that is off track for this purpose, like this: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27154.

I find that I personally often find that left-to-right images feel more balanced, but I've only attended to this in a few cases. Whether it's a general pattern or not, sometimes it's worth flipping the image to see if the reversed one is more pleasing.

Agreed, Dan. All of the inferences I have heard tie the direction we read to the way we look at images and that is frankly not supported by data.

Personal preferences are just that and I generally tend to NOT reverse people when I post-process the images. In my case, that is philosophical as flipping the person that way is not being respectful to my subject. It would not be the person that I photographed.

That is not a "universal" rule I follow. For instance, ff I am doing something creative with a portrait, then I might just do something like that.

[DanK]

I've read that both Vermeer and Rembrandt often reversed images in portraits so that they would be oriented as the subject would see them in a mirror, but that's neither here nor there. My question is not one of tracking direction, but rather of preference. Quite apart from the question of reading direction, there seems to be a widespread preferences for images that have negative space on the right or when subjects are looking or moving toward the right. I personally don't share that preference as a general "rule", but I do occasionally flip images to see whether seem better balanced when reversed. It's trivially easy to check, after all, and the right-left orientation of the subject of the image (landscapes, machinery, whatever) is in many cases entirely arbitrary. The number I have ended up leaving flipped is very small.

[billtils]

Rather than "read left to right" my proference here is guided by "if it's moving, give it space to move into". I'm busy just now (Saturday is the deadline for entries to the club's Colour and Mono print comps and we have an exhibition in the Village Hall to set up, also for Saturday.) but I'll do my best to get back PDQ with the suggested crop.

[DanK]

A quick search online suggests there is some research supporting the view that on average, RTL readers prefer people facing left, while LTR readers prefer people facing right. Here's the citation: https://www.researchgate.net/publica...Facing_Objects. The relevant quote from the abstract:

The results showed that Japanese participants (both vertical and left-to-right readers) and Israeli participants (right-to-left readers) preferred left-facing images over right-facing images, whereas American participants (left-to-right readers) preferred right-facing images over left-facing images.

I haven't pulled the full paper to see what other literature they review or looked for more recent papers that cite this, either supportively or critically.