Too Many Instruments Playing at Once

Thank you to everyone who sent in images for last week’s Creative Critique—Live webinar, and to everyone who joined us. I thought it went really well, and there were many lessons to take away from it.

If there’s one I hope stayed with you, it’s this: your image can have too many instruments playing at once. It was the most common weakness I saw in the submissions, and it’s one I see most often when working with students.

These are photographs where everything is good on its own, the tree, the rocks, the light on the far ridge, the sky, and yet looking at the whole picture doesn’t captivate you. It’s like standing in a room where several people are talking at the same time, and you can’t decide where to place your attention.

A busy picture isn’t about having too many things in it. It’s about having too many things at the same volume, or too many disconnected sounds.

I spent fifteen years as a producer and engineer, and mixing a record comes down to deciding who leads. A song can have dozens of tracks and still feel completely clear, because everyone knows who’s carrying the melody. Bring the lead up, let the rest of the orchestra sit back a little, and the whole arrangement feels wonderfully balanced.

Photographs work the same way. A complex scene can still be a simple picture, as long as one idea clearly leads and everything else plays in support. And often removing instruments actually makes the song sound fuller, not less. That’s because each remaining instrument can fully express their unique sound without overlap from another similar instrument.

“It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.”

Miles Davis

This is the art of arrangement, and it’s equally valid in any visual art form, which is what composition is all about.

Who’s the lead instrument?

In a photograph, finding the lead instrument comes down to a few simple questions. Where is the highest contrast in the picture? Where does the eye go first, and where are you leading the viewer? And are they getting there smoothly, with variation along the way, or are they being stopped, pulled aside by something that keeps them from ever reaching the central focus of the image, whether that’s a subject, an object or a mood?

Once you know who leads, there are a few ways to support the melody instead of competing with it:

• Crop to an ensemble. Move in until you have the lead and the few voices that support it, rather than the whole orchestra.
• Find the stray instrument. Check the edges and corners, where a bright branch or a lone rock is often playing its own tune and stopping the eye before it gets where you want it to go.
• Turn things down, not off. Darken, desaturate or soften the supporting areas so the lead can do its thing. Suggestion is more powerful than description.
• Try black and white as a test. Convert the image and ask whether it gets simpler. Sometimes color is the extra instrument, and sometimes it’s the melody.

None of this has anything to do with your camera. What makes the image work is the arrangement, and arranging is a skill that gets better every time you practice it on purpose.

It’s also something we practice constantly in the Academy, on real images, and once you start hearing the lead instrument in a scene you’ll find you can’t stop.

If this way of working is something you’d like to develop, it’s the heart of what we work on inside the Creative Path Academy, together, every month. And if one-on-one guidance fits you better, take a look at my three-month mentorship. Not sure which is right for you? Book a free call and we’ll figure it out together, no pressure.