Anatomy of Great Photographs

In Anatomy of Great Photographs, photographer and physician Peter Van Rhijn brings a lifetime of photography together with a lifelong instinct to understand why things work.

Through more than 200 pages of nature photography, stories and practical insight, Peter explores the “ingredients” that give photographs their power, from composition and interesting light to visual and emotional impact, colour, mystery and tension.

The idea grew from Peter’s own practice of looking critically at photographs and asking what made some images more successful than others. Over time, that process evolved into his theory of photographic “ingredients”: qualities that photographers can learn to recognize, strengthen and use more deliberately.

Part photography book and part guide to seeing, Anatomy of Great Photographs invites photographers to look more closely at great images, understand what makes them work, and bring that awareness to their own photography.

Peter Van Rhijn has been fascinated by photography since receiving his first camera, a Kodak black-and-white box camera, at the age of ten. Inspired by the photographs his father brought home from travels around the Mediterranean, Peter began a lifelong exploration of photography alongside a very different professional path in medicine.

His photography began with wild orchids and other intimate subjects in nature before expanding to landscapes and natural environments around the world. Over several decades, Peter has presented his work and given instructional talks across North America. His photographs have been, and still are, sold through several stock agencies, including All Canada Photos and SuperStock.

Throughout that time, Peter kept returning to a deceptively simple question: Why do some photographs work better than others? His analytical instincts as a physician led him to study the anatomy of successful images and, eventually, to develop the theory of photographic “ingredients” at the heart of Anatomy of Great Photographs.