I think those minimal units would be pixels in digital photography, and photographers can use cameras and the ophthalmological (stealing from the eye docs) and syntactic tools at their disposal to manipulate and combine those pixels, conveying layers upon layers of meaning, much like in a spoken language.īut the bar seems to be lower for visual media, somehow. Photography also has a lexicon made up of units, like words in language, that are combined to form an infinite number of images (phrases and sentences). The rule of thirds in action (from the Digital Photography School) All of that seems relatively comparable between systems. (But of course, photographic license, like poetic license, is also allowed.) Ok. Similar to sentence structure, the rule of thirds in photography tells you where to place points of interest for maximum effect.

You can play with light using combinations of shutter speed and aperture to convey different meanings, as you can use various words to convey meaning, for instance. Those images and concepts then have to be encoded in a way that brains can understand them. Like the ears take in sounds and meaning, the eyes process images. In a spoken language, sounds (with which phonology is concerned) and meaning/concepts (semantics) have to be encoded in a certain way, and there needs to be a system to organize these ideas (syntax), to make sure a speaker’s brain and a receiver’s brain can understand the intended meaning. Take photography in particular, and the linguistic concepts of phonology, syntax, and semantics. From that basic description, it would seem as though a visual symbolic system might function in a way similar to a spoken language. Language is a way to communicate your thoughts to others.

But I think it’s better for me to just leave this as a stream of consciousness. I tried to come up with a good lede that tied all of my thoughts together. Warning: Use of undefined constant user_level - assumed 'user_level' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /home/commons/public_html/wp-content/plugins/ultimate-google-analytics/ultimate_ga.php on line 524

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