Eye-catchers

When thinking about simplification and selecting your primary subject or focus of interest, it can be helpful to consider some of the ways we tend to perceive and "notice" things. Any of the following things are usually attention-catchers, and suitable as a focus for simplification, arranged roughly according to their strength:

• Eyes
• Faces
• The human form in general
• Animals
• Light colored objects (against a dark background)
• Dark objects (against a light background)
• Warm-colored objects (against cool-colored or desaturated backgrounds: red on green, red on gray)
• Objects with strong contrast

By "strength" I mean that a "stronger" attention-grabber tends to win out over a "weaker" one, in case of competition. The attention-grabbers can also be combined to great effect. For example, in a photograph of a group of people dressed in grayish clothes and looking away, an individual in bright-colored or white clothing and looking into the camera will stand out. Find some interesting way of positioning her, and you could have a pretty good picture!