The legendary Michael Freeman told me how to ‘design a photo’ for this era

I meet world-famous photographer Michael Freeman in East London. He and I used to work together for years on his series of photography instruction books, including the smash hit The Photographer’s Eye. And now that times are changing, he has put the modern equivalent of pen to paper to make significant changes to that essential text.

First, though, we catch up. Michael is actually working more now than when we last saw each other a few years ago. Next week he’s flying off to Cupertino, California, and last week he was in China. He’s got a lot going on in the superpower that is China, including an exhibition coming up in Shanghai, and some spectacular assignments befitting a photographer of his standing.

All told, his books on the subject of photography have shifted well over 4 million copies over the years – and he and I have worked together on assignments in New York, Los Angeles, Yosemite and San Francisco.

I’m definitely starting to feel somewhat less glamorous showing him the sights of East London, not so far from my home, but it’s where we chose to meet, and it represented a new “adventure” for him (by which he meant, I imagine, there was more risk than traditionally nicer bits of the city!).

Bringing us back to the now, I wonder: why would the book that I used to say 'every photographer should read' need to be given a significant rewrite?

“Technology,” Michael begins, before going on to explain that, while you might think that composing a photograph hasn’t changed since I was working as his publisher, there has been a great deal more research and he is able to explain it.

The reason? Because there are just more words these days.

“Semantic analysis is something that has happened since; it’s been formalized now.”

Michael Freeman is one of the photographers advising Apple on aesthetic science, the knowledge that is fed to the team responsible for developing the computational imagery.

The era of AI imaging means a lot of work is going into machine learning which, as Michael explains, “just means being able to recognize things… [taking] an image into pieces.”

Part of that, which we didn’t cover as well before with the earlier edition, is “the biggest problem – composition is such a vast subject you need to find where to start, so the new plan is trying to find that.”

The new book will cover “salience” – understanding the importance of elements of a scene and building it around them.

During our conversation, I was struck by how Michael has kept up to date with the latest changes in the industry, his work advising tech companies mixing with assignments for glamorous brands. This information has folded into the book, making the update more than extensive.

The Photographer's Eye: Definitive Edition is out now for £25 from Ilex (part of Hachette).

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