Rhythm

Music has a beat; it has a rhythm that you can feel. Sometimes the silence between the notes is just as important as what you hear. Photos can be like that too.

You hear people say a photo has good lines; it has a sense of movement. Repetitive patterns in a picture can be a deafening as the bang of a drum. We can throw in converging parallels lines to show distance like a fading echo, we place a dominant object in the foreground like a crescendo. And just like the pause between notes we can leave empty space in a picture to convey a rhythm of sorts.

I was at a dance troop rehearsal for a performance a few months ago when I took this picture. I wasn’t sure we would run it because I put a lot of “dead space” in the frame. I caught the dancer grouped against a bank of lights. I like the feeling of pause before they move into the frame. It is that feel of rhythm, a sense of movement even though they are standing still.