Keep moving!

One of the best things about giving “shoot and critique” workshops is that I get the opportunity to see what participants can make out of a given situation. It’s great to see how different and interesting their visions are-I constantly learn things from my students by observing their photographic vision. But it’s also a great environment for me to be able to give knowledgeable feedback. Over the years, one of the most common themes I’ve seen in my feedback, particularly to beginning photographers, is suggesting that the image might have improved if the photographer had moved a little-whether left, right, forward, back, up or down.

Every movement of the camera and photographer changes the “choreography” of the images, some subjects get bigger, some smaller, and the position of the elements involved changes as well. Perhaps some appear – or disappear – around other objects. The positioning of the objects in the frame changes as well, movement is a powerful photographic tool.

Even small changes in position can make a big difference in an image. Hiking to the top of Skägafoss the day before yesterday, I had some soft light that I thought would work well for long time exposures, creating detail shots at the top of the waterfall that juxtaposed the soft blurred water with textured, solid rock. I’ve included two relatively similar images from that hike here, which were taken only a couple paces from each other, but the change in perspective is significant. In one image the rock at the far side of the waterfall is visible and an important element. In the second, a a few seconds and a few paces later, that rock wall is shifted off the left side of the frame, resulting in a significantly more abstract image.

At the other end of the scale, sometimes it’s possible to make use of much larger movements. Later that same evening, I noticed some interesting rays coming through the clouds in the distance, and several degrees to the side, the Westman Islands (Vestmannaeyjar)  at a similar scale.

I honestly wasn’t sure if this would work, that is, if the two were at different enough differences that I could change their relative perspective easily, but over the next few minutes it became clear that by driving (at about 90 kilometers per hour) back west that I could bring the two together. (The clouds were moving as well, but my own movement seemed to be a greater effect.) I was as surprised as anyone when the rays stuck around for the 15 minutes or so that I continued driving. The last few minutes I started looking for a workable foreground element. I eventually got several shots of the elements together, realizing an image that I had started composing perhaps 15 or 20 miles away.

And that’s the heart of the matter. Learning to see that “this is nice, but there’s probably even a better location over there” before you get there an essential photographic skill.

Watch out for “zooming when you should have moved.” I’m as guilty of this as anyone. All too often, with a tripod set up and the camera in position, it seems a little easier to zoom in on a subject rather than to take a step forward or backward. Sometimes that’s the right choice (of course), and sometimes moving isn’t possible (perhaps there’s a wall in the way, or perhaps the best arrangement could only be captured from a position several feet on the wrong side of a cliff. But sometimes it’s helpful to move in or move out (and perhaps zoom) to, in part, compensate-particularly when this lets you eliminate distracting elements, or to get a better proportion of the size of the elements in the image.

If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

A while back we talked about visual echoes–and we primarily focused on repetitions of two similar or contrasting objects. Today I’m going to revisit that topic with a greater emphasis on repetition generally, whether two, eleven or a million similar image elements.  If you didn’t get a chance to read the echoes post, I suggest going back and and reading it now, many of the ideas in today’s post will relate to and reflect on the ideas I presented there.

Repetition is a powerful and amazingly versatile tool.

One of my favorite uses of repetition in composition is in simplifying an image. In general, images with many kinds of disparate elements can be harder for the viewer to make sense of–put enough elements together and you take away an easy sense of what elements of the image are important, dominant.

Repeating patterns in an image can help organize all of those elements into a pattern that’s easier for the viewer to understand. Salt Polygons at Sunrise has hundreds of elements, but our eye quickly integrates the underlying pattern of the salt polygons and makes sense of what’s going on in the image. A random collection of that many disparate elements in an image would feel much more chaotic. (Of course, that might be what you want, but more often, my own work tends towards less chaotic.)

Like visual echoes, repetitions of similar objects can guide us to compare and/or contrast the elements in the image. This is a particularly crucial part of  Clouds Forming in Alpenglow. While the repeated pattern in the mountain peaks does simplify the image a bit, the repeated pattern of the clouds is far more important.  A single diagonal cloud would tell the viewer very little about the dynamics of what’s going on behind that cloud; however, three clouds each moving in a parallel direction away from the repeated peaks in the image presents a much deeper question as to what’s going on. In this case, that pattern isn’t an accident, the clouds are literally being formed downwind of the peaks, and the blurred cloud motion helps to confirm that fact.

Salt Polygons also compares repeated elements, and “shows us” depth and scale as a result. We “see” the repetition of polygons, we compare them and (subconsciously) notice them recede as we move up the image (as well as change in shape), and we quickly and intuitively grasp that we’re looking across a vast, flat plane of these polygons.

Finally, one can strengthen the power of repetition by putting the repeated elements into a line, and making use of the special   properties of lines and edges that we’ve talked about in earlier posts.  Dawn Migration and Tabular Iceberg provides a very simplistic example, comparing and contrasting the repeated, blurred bird images in this print becomes more interesting as our eye is guided through the composition by the lines of the flock.

Beyond a certain number of repeated elements, our repetitions often lose their their independent existence and begin to take on the sense of a single object, a rhythm, a texture. My sand dune abstracts, such as Desert Rhythms VIII, contain a number of examples of that idea. Even short of these extremes, though, a rhythm, that is, a repetition not only of elements but of distances between the elements, strengthens the power of repeating elements and helps unify them into a single visual element.

With all these possibilities, compositional repetition is an important tool for creating powerful and effective images.