From time to time the term ‘Gestalt’ has come up in articles and classes on composition. I never quite grasped the concept. I thought Gestalt is an approach some psychologists use in their counseling. And to make matters even more confusing, the origin of the term didn’t help. It comes from the German word that means ‘shape.’ It just wasn’t sinking in. Until recently….
The concept started to make sense as I was preparing the Mastering Landscape Photography class for the Joshua Tree National Park Desert Institute here in California. In this course I take a deep dive into light and composition. I’ve been studying the ‘rules’ of composition for many years now and the authors tend to make broad generalizations on the effect they have on the viewers. More recently I studied the impact colors have, not from the perspective of visual arts but rather from the studies performed by researchers in psychology. Through their studies, the researchers found that the colors they studied, generally prime colors, can have either a positive or negative effect on their subjects. And the effect depended on many factors but based on these factors they were consistent. That got me thinking.
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