I noticed today an initiative in my Jetpack app about blogging prompts, which I don’t usually participate in, but hey, new year, try new things. It is a daily theme, but I would like to check expectations upfront. First, I am in no way a daily blogger, and second, our dogs interrupted nearly every paragraph in this post. I know when I would be overcommitting when it has taken nearly all day just to write this one. Ha! The theme prompts are generic, but it gave me an idea to try to tie some of these themes in with the scope of this blog. So I will be picking and choosing which themes to take on.

Today’s theme topic “Clutter” caught my attention because for a little bit now, I have been following various minimalist lifestyle pages. It is an ongoing goal of mine to minimize my impact on the planet, my wallet, and my mental health. A recent article in National Geographic discussed the effect of clutter on our brains and health.¹ And if there is one thing for me that is long overdue, it is the need to declutter – my desk, my office, the things I own, etc. So this is a topic that I think about a lot, in a lot of different ways. However, I also do not feel a need to contribute to the clutter of posts and articles about decluttering! <heh>

On a very related tangent, clutter has much to do with visual psychology and the evolutionary biological characteristics of our vision systems and brains. This is a field that I find highly intriguing because, well, I am a photographer! Understanding what contributes to clutter in a photograph is a large part of being able to make photographs more impactful. So in this post, I will wander a bit into those aspects because I find it much more interesting than cleaning my desk or committing to cleaning my desk.

Visual Clutter = Visual Stress

If there was one tip I could offer anyone about improving their photographs that stands above so many others, it is to understand visual clutter. Honestly, it is something where I find little “visual boogers” even in recent photographs. And as I learn more about the evolutionary aspects of our abilities to see, I realize that this isn’t entirely unexpected. Our familiarity with an environment, our mental state of tiredness, our physical state of feeling well, and a whole host of other things impact our abilities regarding change blindness. It’s why dumpster diving through my archives sometimes makes me want to re-edit older images or find something interesting I missed in the first rounds of review.

Another interesting thing aspect of the topic is that nature itself can appear to be quite cluttered. Couple that with an information bottleneck at which our brains can process and encode visual stimuli. An overload in visual stimuli results in visual stress, realized consciously or subconsciously. And it is important to consider the emphasis on “appear” because that can be quite individualistic.

In my favorite photographs for 2022, I recalled an episode of the Apple TV+ series “The Mosquito Coast” where a father pointed out to his son that the apparent chaos of the jungle is directly a function of our ability to understand what we are looking at. One observer may look at a convoluted tangle of vines and see all individual elements, but another may see them as a singular system. Some can group and summarize visual inputs based on knowledge or perspective.

Given we can’t know the viewer’s familiarity with any particular subject or what they may intuitively pool together, photographers are often told to simplify, reframe, and exclude what isn’t necessary to support the subject. We end up appealing to the lowest common denominators to bring forth a clearer, more impactful photograph.

Those common denominators are stimuli that we know people react to first when evaluating visual data. That is a result of evolutionary biology in picking out things that may not belong in our environment, such as a threat. The faster we react to something may ultimately determine our survival. Being able to blend in is also a countermeasure to this evolutionary characteristic, which gives us the varieties of camouflage in the animal kingdom. In a photograph, such physiological reactions can either be harnessed or work against you.

In photography, we attempt to manipulate these elements of scenes primarily through sharpness and contrast, as those two basic visual properties have strong evolutionary coding in our brains. The use of various lenses, focal points, aperture control, exposure as well as post-exposure development helps emphasize where we want the attention to be in the photograph, and reduce or eliminate what doesn’t. These are often referred to as “eye-pulls”, “flankers”, “distractors” or even “visual boogers.” Our emotional attachments to a photograph can overrule some of these things, but we must at least be cognizant of the fact the viewer is not necessarily going to have that impairment. Therefore an out-of-place bit of contrast or sharpness may become one of those eye-pulls.

Measuring visual clutter

There are a lot of photography articles and posts about simplifying photographs, and we know certain visual elements can pose distractions. But how much is an interesting problem. Is it possible to take some of the subjectivity out of it and measure the impact on the final image? It’s a problem that interests researchers in visual cognition and the study of visual search. In a paper published in The Journal of Vision, MIT researchers Rosenholtz, Li, and Nakano propose two such measurements – Feature Congestion and Subband Entropy – which can help quantify the impacts on a subject’s cognition of visual inputs.²

The paper itself makes for a very interesting read approaching it from a photography perspective. As intuitive as it seems to be that lower Feature Congestion in an image makes it more effective in simplifying and communicating a message, it is also guided by the entropy of those features and/or the distractions. You don’t see the term entropy used very often when it comes to discussions about composition and photography, so I find it a particularly intriguing application.

If such aspects of an image can be modeled, then I wonder how much of a leap it would be to be able to offer some type of programming or algorithm that could provide feedback on any particular photograph. Over time, we somewhat learn to recognize distractive elements by intuition and experience. But it is indeed a learned aspect of the craft vs. what we do creatively. If we can have Generative AI relate text to images, AI that can recognize sharper features of an image than others – then why couldn’t it be a tool to operate in reverse and offer an evaluation to a photographer (or any creator)?

Just as an LCD can display “blinkies” or gamut warnings for areas of over or under-exposure, it could also communicate aspects of contrast and sharpness entropy. In theory, a processing engine could offer it in the display of a camera or a feature in software post-exposure to help flag or guide improvements in a composition. Perhaps a multi-colored Feature Congestion overlay?

This would be a much more helpful tool to me than being able to insert a lighthouse or person in a red coat into any landscape photograph.

Dealing with Clutter

Clutter is one aspect I try to be more mindful of in making new photographs as well as when visiting my archives. I try to keep in mind if something “feels off” in any particular image, that I should start looking at some of these basic cues tied to the very evolution of our species. I am grateful for all the researchers who have spent time evaluating why we see the things we do. I am also thankful that modern tools have made it easier to mitigate such things through luminosity controls, masking, and more intelligent healing tools. Now I just have to apply all of these things to the state of my desk.

1. Austin, D. (2024). Being Organized Can Improve Mental Health (subscriber-only article), National Geographic. ↩︎
2. Rosenholtz, R., Li, Y., Nakano, L. (2007). Measuring Visual Clutter. Journal of Vision. Vol. 7, 17. [doi] ↩︎