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.

Today I’m going to take a brief digression from specific compositional topics, back up, and talk about compositional “rules”.  I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating.

They’re not rules.

By this point in the Tuesday Composition series I’ve written about almost thirty ideas, each of which could be thought of as one (or perhaps a couple of) rules. But using them as rules will, in the end, limit your creative reach as a photographer. I urge you, in fact, I beg you not to use them as rules, either when you create your own images or, just as importantly, you look at an image of another photographer.

Let’s talk about that. It’s easier to begin this discussion by thinking not only about our own work but someone else’s. When I see a new image from a book, an advertisement, whatever, the first thing I do is to look at it, to see it. I do not drag out my list of rules and walk through it adding up a score. Instead, I look, and feel what I feel, notice what I feel. I don’t start with an analytical process, I start with an intuitive, visual process.

Once it’s made an impression, I’ll then try and figure out why. Why does this image seem particularly powerful? Why does this image seem random and uninteresting to me? More often than not (but hardly always!) I’ll be able to put words to at least some of those feelings. I’ll say, “Gee, this feels a little static, I wonder why, oh, it’s a little centered without a reason.” But the feelings come first, the guidelines come second, when I look at images.

At this point, you may be wondering: “Why am I reading this column, then?” How do guidelines help?

Guidelines serve two important purposes.

First, they’re a useful starting point for ideas when you’re strugging to improve an image that just isn’t working. Imagine that you’re working a broad landscape, you look through the viewfinder and go “Gee, that isn’t quite working, I wonder why?” If you’ve spent some time reading about compositional ideas, you might not only be able to figure out what isn’t working (say, a centered horizon), and as a result figure out what to do about it (tilt the camera up and down, see what looks good.)

These guidelines can help you brainstorm ideas for improving your images on-the-fly.

The second reason to read about compositional guidelines is even more important, it builds your intuition. Reading this column is far from the only way to do that, I’d also suggest that you go out and look at lots of photographs. Look at images in books, in magazines, in galleries, on web sites. Look for images that you really love, and try and figure out why you really love them. The guidelines will often help.

This process of looking at images (yours or someone else’s) and putting words and ideas to them helps build your intuiton. It’s a little easier to start with other people’s images. After all, you already know what you were trying to do with an image. Only another viewer will be able to tell you if you’ve successfully communicated with your image to someone else. This is why it’s so helpful to get feedback on your own images from other photographers, workshop leaders, anyone whose photographic “eye” you really respect.

Building intuition is part of building and refining your photographic vision. When your intuition can guide your camera in the right direction, you’ll be able to see and react in the field without a lot of distracting left-brain overthinking, and your images will be stronger and more creative as a result. It may be ironic that this path to intution involves a lot of left-brain thinking and reading, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

No rules, just guidelines, ideas and intuition.

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.

So far in this series we’ve discussed images “in the box” of a single rectangular frame. Today, I’ll talk a little about ways to “think outside the box” and use multiple images together as part of a single artwork.

First, a few words of terminology. Diptychs were traditionally any sort of artwork or other object with two plates connected together with a hinge. These days the hinge is optional, and the term is applied to any sort of art in which two pieces are meant to be hung together (usually in a particular arrangement). Triptych refers to the same idea with three images. Polyptych is the general term for two or more pieces. Multiples is sometimes used similarly to polyptych (although the former might be two images printed separately on the same piece of paper). I’m going to stick with “multiples” here as the most inclusive term.

In nearly every multiple, we’re encouraged to consider the relationship between the individual parts of the artwork. The relative placement of the different parts within the artwork is one part of this; if the two halves of a diptych are laid out left to right, we’ll be far more likely to “read” the left image first and the right image second. To the extent that the images combine to tell a story, the left segment of the image will usually tell an earlier part of the story, the right segment the latter part. Not every multiple tells a story (Andy Warhol’s famous silk-screened multiples of Marilyn Monroe don’t seem to really imply a sequence in time), but many do.

Much as the relative position of the different segments of the image are important, so too is the relative position of the segments in the view of what we’re looking at. This is best explained by example. In Morning Commute, Bosque del Apache, the camera was pointed in the same direction for each frame, many of the elements of the two images are identical, only the birds really “move.”  The focus in that diptych is purely on the story, that is, the sequence of events.

On the other hand, in my Chiricahua Sunset diptych, not only is the second panel hung to the right of (after) the first panel, but the second panel also was taken with the camera pointing to the right of where the camera was pointing in the first segment. There is still a sense of sequence here, the right piece does seem to me to come after the first one in time, but there’s also a sense of the relative positioning of the two, even a sense of the camera having moved to the right, as if it were panning. I believe this sense of movement is enhanced by the fact that the two views overlap a bit, I think that dyptychs in which the views of the individual panels just barely avoid overlapping each other often feel more static, perhaps more peaceful, than pieces with overlapping fields of view.

Symmetry is another theme that often comes into play in multiples, particularly diptychs. My Chiricahua piece gets an interesting sense of balance from symmetry, and I think somehow the symmetry of the two pieces (plus the very visible disc of the sun) helps the viewer perceive that the two images are different parts of essentially the same view.

Last but not least, dyptychs often are used to contrast two things, and to talk about  opposition in the ways we discussed last week. The Bosque images contrast a very static moment in time with a very dynamic moment in the same location to tell a very simple story. While I believe both images are effective individually, I think they’re even more effective taken together.

Give diptychs and other multiples a try. They’re fun, and provide an easy and effective way to add movement and interest to your images. (Just as importantly for those of you trying to make a living at photography, they’re often of interest to interior designers and art consultants in a way that individual photographs aren’t.)

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.

Opposites attract ... our attention.

Opposition is one of the primary themes in photographic composition, one which was first emphasized to me by Frans Lanting, the powerfully talented photographic storyteller. At the simplest level, putting together two areas of different tone (brightness) forms a contrast which pulls our eyes toward the boundary between them. Contrasting opposing colors has a similar effect, attracting our attention and actually enhancing the saturation and power of the individual colors.

But using contrast and opposition in composition goes far beyond that, contrasting concepts can be a very powerful tool for composing a photography to communicate a particular message. Contrasting concepts, much as with contrasting colors, has two effects.

First, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the nature of the contrast. The black and white of a yin-yang symbol draws our attention to tones, the difference between light and dark.  Similarly, a photograph of an infant and an adult leads the viewer to think about age, and as a result, perhaps issues of family relationships and parenting. It’s almost impossible to view Guanaco Anticipating the Future without thinking about the relationship between the two animals (we assume that one is the parent of the other), a concept that wouldn’t come to mind nearly as quickly if I’d only included one animal (or two of the same age and size).

Second, contrasting two things seems to often exaggerate each of them. If we put a smooth texture next to a rough texture, both the smoothness and the roughness are stronger, more apparent. If we put a moving object (perhaps communicated with motion blur) in an unmoving scene the sense of motion may be enhanced.

In Pink Floating Mists, the glowy, surreal look of the mountains of Torres del Paine is enhanced and highlighted by the sharpness and clarity of the foreground–try covering the bottom of the image with a sheet of paper and see how the image loses “oomph” as a result. In Pond and Drake’s Estero, which I discussed in a previous post about low-contrast images, the sense of how far the estuary is, and how large it is, is emphasized by comparing and contrasting it with the much nearer, much smaller pond. That sense is reinforced by the contrast in contrasts, the pond being high contrast and the estuary being low contrast helps strengthen the opposition between the two.

There are dozens (at least) of such oppositions that are handy fodder for photographers. Young and old. Smooth and rough. Fast and slow. Happy and sad. Big and small. Feminine and masculine. Cold and warm. Awake and asleep. Light and dark. Clothed and nude. Ordered and chaotic. Wet and dry. Rich and poor. Tall and wide. Simple and complex. Symmetric and asymmetric. Natural and man-made. Straight and curved. Engaged (with the viewer’s attention, e.g., looking at the camera) and disengaged. Brand-new and decayed. Rich and poor. I’m sure you can think of dozens more–in fact, I invite you to point me to examples of your own work that demonstrate the power of contrasts.

When composing images in a new area, I often look first to see what the most important objects and ideas are before working to include as much of those as possible. But I’ll often also be looking for contrasts which help me guide the viewers’ attention to a concept–because it’s such an effective way of communicating ideas within a photograph.

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.

Like mist and fog, water is a subject that deserves it’s own consideration compositionally. With the exception of very still lakes and ponds, one of the things that makes water “look like water” to us is the way that it moves. We can’t present this movement in a still image to a viewer directly. Instead, we have to translate it into a still image by making an exposure; and we use a variety of controls such as shutter speed and composition to help communicate a sense of that motion.

When we want to capture a sense of movement in water there are several things to keep in mind. Shutter speed has a significant effect-a waterfall, cascade or even surf against a coastline will have a very soft, gentle feel if we use a long exposure. Faster exposures will stop individual droplets in air, creating a greater sense of energy.  Shutter speed isn’t the only thing to keep an eye on, though. The way we compose the path of water through a scene can also affect how viewers experience water moving through a scene. Where possible, try and make it easy for the viewer’s eye to trace along the lines of the water’s path. Your images will (all other things being equal) be more effective if the visual flow of the water isn’t interrupted by things that block the view of the water. Diagonals and  S-curves can also create an additional sense of motion.

My early  Trillium Falls images demonstrate this. Taken on the same day, a few minutes apart, they both enjoy a really interesting subject and spectacular color. What makes them different is their composition. Despite the similarities, Trillium Falls II is by far the more popular of the two images; it is in fact my largest selling image to date. (Small matted prints of this image make great Christmas presents!)  Were I to edit that shoot today, I’d probably leave Trillium Falls I on the editing-room floor. That’s not that I is a bad image, it’s simply that II is more effective, and the greatest reason it’s more effective (I believe) is that the flow of water through the waterfall is less interrupted in II than in I.

Still water is an entirely different photographic animal. If you want to really emphasize the stillness of a body of water, you’ll want to avoid the lines, curves, diagnoals and other movement cues we used above. Often uninterrupted expanses of water can work well for this.

Very smooth water surfaces can take on a mirror-like surface, which can be an interesting source of reflections. To get the best “mirror-like” reflections, you’ll want not only completely smooth water, but also a shallow viewing angle, which puts some practical constraints on your compositions. Looking straight down into a still lake you’ll typically be able to see a lot of what’s underneath. It is when you look farther out into the lake that the reflections become more dominant. It’s possible (and sometimes even interesting) to make use of this effect, to show a little bit of “what’s underneath” and ‘what’s reflected” in different parts of the same scene, as I have in Bush Skeleton. (Polarizers also have an effect on how mirror-like a water surface will appear.)

Because of its transparency, its reflectiveness and its movement, water is an interesting and unusual part of the compositional playbook.

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.

Many of the topics we’ve discussed so far talk about the relationship between two objects in an image, from their relative distance from the camera to whether one is left or right of the other to visual similarity between two objects. Many of the cues we use to communicate using photographs stem from these sorts of signs. Today I’ll talk about another example: what happens when one image frames another within a photograph. I’ll say that the enclosing object “frames” the enclosed object, but here I’m not referring to picture frames, I’m still talking about parts of the photographic image itself.

These frames tend to serve two ends. Visually, frames in general (and darker frames in particular) often guide the eye toward the center of an image much in the same way that edge-burning does. As a matter of meaning,   framing often provides context for the enclosed subject of the image. I think it’s likely that these two effects are related; our eyes are pulled to the center,   the enclosed object in such a photograph, and as a result that object becomes the primary subject of the image. The frame itself speaks second, not first.

North Falls Canyon is a simple enough example. The top and bottom of the image show parts of a cave mouth. That placement (as well as the dark, featureless nature of the cave walls) pulls our attention into the canyon beyond, while leaving a quiet reminder of where we are viewing the canyon from.

It is interesting to compare Mesa Arch Panorama with North Falls Canyon. Other than the fact that the cave in the former image is fictional (the top of the image is a pretty famous freestanding arch of rock), the two images appear very similar, but I find that Mesa manages to extract another dose of meaning from the framing; the cramped enclosed nature of the “cave” in that image seems to help create a greater sense of openness, scale and space in the canyons and mountains beyond. Certainly the large swath of dark frame at the top of the image contributes to the sense of a cramped, enclosed space. But why does this make the landscape seem larger? Perhaps it’s the contrast (small and large, dark and light) that helps create this sense, perhaps it’s something about the shape of the frame (without the arch, the same image has a lot of blank blue sky, which seems to rob the mountains and canyons of their scale.

Framing can also be used the same way we often use near-far compositions, that is, to juxtapose a small detail element with a larger environment. Unlike many near-far compositions, however, the more distant part of the image (the enclosed part of the image) usually ends up becoming the primary subject, rather than the nearer part. In Framed Globe, a quick grab shot from Bodie, I’m able to juxtapose some detail of the window frame (providing a sense of age and detail with both the globe and reflections of the surrounding town. The frame contributes to our understanding of what we’re seeing, and it’s helpful that we get to see it very close, but it isn’t the primary subject of the photograph.

Frames provide a compelling visual pull to many images, and it’s worth some experimenting with them to understand how to use them more effectively in your own photography.