Simplicity

The best photos are usually the simplest photos. If a photo has too much content, too many things going on, your eye doesn't know what to concentrate on. Your mind gets bored and is soon ready to move on to something else. Simple compositions, with as much extraneous material as possible removed, are usually more pleasing and interesting to the eye.

Green Shutter, Charleston, SC  -  2012

(Click on photo to enlarge.)

At first glance, a single shuttered window on a blank wall of the slave quarters at the Aiken-Rhett house didn't look like much of a photo op. As part of a larger composition containing the entire side of the house, this single shutter would be lost and insignificant. As the subject of its own composition, I think it becomes much more interesting. We can examine it's brilliant green color, the texture of the wood, the obviously home-made hinges. Since this building pre-dates the Civil War, we can wonder how many times this shutter has been painted in the last century and a half. What did the slaves who lived behind this window see and think as they looked out? Simplicity - there is usually more where there is less.