I appreciate that I’m not the first to use music as a metaphor for photography but I’m continue in the vein that I begun last time.
One of the things that I realized in learning guitar was that while many songs were indeed still quite strong when stripped down to the basic guitar part often they were not as strong as the full band version. Even more so was that the recorded version often had a build that is not evident in a stripped back version. Cue more cowbell. If you are to take a favorite song and truly dissect it I suspect that you’ll find layers of complexity that you didn’t suspect. Parts that come in early in the song are gone later, or vice versa. You’ll find accents that only make themselves present in the later choruses. This layering keeps the song interesting and you engaged. We should do the same when photographing.
Attention is a rare commodity we need to work hard to keep people’s attention on our photograph, to make them worth further exploration.