| Empirical literature on the psychological processes involved in professional and artistic photography is extremely scarce. This dissertation project attempted to integrate relevant information, taken from several disparate literatures, to derive a sense of the likely nature of creativity and expertise in artistic photography. We argued that superior performance in photography can likely be understood as a function of principles of expertise operating in other domains, especially those with a strong creative and perceptual-motor component. Educational guidelines and noteworthy photographers' own accounts of their creative processes provide a rich supplementary set of ideas to help define and understand the nature of creativity and expertise in artistic photography. Consolidating this information, we tested a series of hypotheses and empirical research methodologies. The tasks looked at both routine (Study 1) and creative (Study 2) aspects of photographic expertise. The routine aspects were assessed by examining both groups' ability to identify photographic flaws, whereas the creative aspects were observed through tasks involving image capture under spatially or temporally constrained conditions and later selection of best images. The dependent measures were quality ratings of the resulting images obtained from another group of experts and non-experts. In Study 3, we compared experts' and novices' aesthetic judgment criteria pertinent to photography. We found that expert photographers outperformed novices on both routine and creative tasks. Both groups were differentially sensitive to four types of photographic flaws, with photographers outperforming non-photographers in flaw detection. Specifically, identifying lighting and lens flaws was easier than identifying subject and composition flaws. In addition, in the creative tasks in Study 2, selection of best images affected the quality ratings. This suggests that expertise in photography is a combination of technical skills and creative ability. Finally, experts and novices showed similarities and differences in their aesthetic judgment criteria. Both groups showed a complex first factor with strong loadings of pleasantness, content and overall quality. The second and third factors represented familiarity and dynamism. The main difference was on the fourth factor, which for novices was overall quality as associated with technical quality. Experts' factor patterns were also more coherent and explained more total variability. |
