Why I prefer more minimalist aesthetics in photography:

1. Minimalist images as more powerful and strong.

The simpler you can make your photos, the more powerful they are.

The goal: make the strongest and most powerful photos possible.

2. Extreme contrast, inverse, Gaussian blur, fill image

The test to know whether your photos are simple and strong: apply extreme contrast (S curve), inverse the image, apply Gaussian Blur, and fill in the image.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

3. How to select your photo

Let’s assume you find a scene you like and you’ve made a lot of photos of it. Then comes the practical question:

How do I know which photo is the best?

What I try to do:

Strive to choose the photo with the maximum simplicity of shapes and forms, yet the most dynamic action.

For example this is a tighter edit of the above photos:

• 

• 

• 

• 

Then what I’d say is this:

Figure out what the “visual gist” of the image is.

For example these sketches in Procreate and my iPad took like 3 seconds each:

Once we group all the minimal sketches and filled images together, then it is far simpler to determine which composition is simplest and best: