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I want a photograph to catch your eye, pull you in and make you linger.  I want the image to have impact, be memorable, and leave you with a desire to return and look again.
A musical composer faces the same challenge – to write music that provokes and sustains listeners' attention.  So it should come as no surprise that good music and good photography have common features.
I was never much of a musician but I did study piano from when I was a young boy until my late teens. One of my favorite composers was Johann Sebastian Bach, the 18 th century classical master whose music is a sublime expression of a type of composition called “counterpoint”.  Counterpoint also works well as an approach to composing photographs, an idea I will illustrate with five photographs.
But before doing that I want to put the question of composition into context. Success in producing a photograph that attracts and holds your interest is outside my control because your respons...

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Mark Schacter
Mark Schacter
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Mark Schacter’s photography encompasses subjects ranging from landscapes to urban and architectural to industrial. Three books of his photography have been published: Houses of Worship (2013), Sweet Seas. Portraits of the Great Lakes (2012) and Roads (2010). He compares his approach to photography to “the way an archaeologist might search for clues about an extinct civilization. I see landscapes and cityscapes as being filled with traces of human striving – attempts to build things, enjoy life, raise families, create wealth or simply leave behind physical evidence that will outlast a human lifetime; evidence that says ‘someone has been here’ “. His most recent exhibition, a selection of 20 photographs from Houses of Worship, opened at the Photopolis Festival of Photography in Halifax, Nova Scotia in September, 2014. His latest project, West, can be seen on YouTube, in high-definition, at http://youtu.be/zU1dRHynaQU Mark lives in Ottawa, Canada. A broad selection of his work can be seen at www.luxetveritas.net
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