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.

I was recently struck by the fact that one of my puffin images, Puffin IV, had been selected into two different shows by two different groups of jurors for two quite competitive shows. I was a little surprised–I would not have thought, of my various images that have been included in shows in the last year, that it would be this particular image that fared best of the images I submitted.

My surprise, plus a sale or two, led me to “take another look” at the image. As you might expect (it is, after all, Tuesday), composition was at the heart of my surprise. If the main parts of a photograph are subject, light and composition (I think beginning photographers often focus too much on subject)   it’s light on the subject and composition that really tend to pull together an effective photograph. There are far more interesting photographs of mundane subjects in interesting light and/or interesting compositions than the other way around.

There’s no question here that there’s an interesting subject (puffins really are wonderful subjects) and that the light is working as well enough. But neither light nor subject are enough to carry off this image alone. I’ve got hundreds more shots of puffins from the same location, many in similar light, but this one stands out. Why? Those of you who have been reading this column since the beginning will be able to pick out a large number themes I’ve touched on.

The bird is, as a whole, a highlight, so our eye naturally heads there. The bird, as well as some of the grasses and flowers, have high contrast, which pulls the eye there relative to the dark out-of-focus background, where the low contrast keeps our eyes from spending too much time examining. While there isn’t a lot of color in most of the image, the brightest colors pull our eye straight to the puffin’s head. The combination of which direction the puffin is looking, and his placement off-center in the image provide a sense of space and contributes to our sense that we can imagine what the bird is feeling.

I’ve probably missed a few more principles that apply, but that list is long enough for me to make my point: While none of those compositional principles by themselves hit me over the head when I look at Puffin IV, the sheer number of them contributing to how I see the image seem to work synergistically.

While an image like Alabama Hills Sunset nearly screams just one or two compositional principles at me, the puffin image achieves whatever strength it has through a chorus of quieter compositional voices that (I believe) harmonize successfully. I think that helped it “sneak by” my attention a bit, I think that’s why I found myself a little bit surprised.

One final word: Puffin IV provides a further example of a point I made last week, that learning these compositional rules is as much a way to build your photographic intuition and vision rather than an algorithm for making a good image.  I’m sure that I didn’t consider all of these principles when I shot Puffin IV. I did think about some things –I knew I wanted some of the few flowers around there on the bird cliffs, and I really liked the idea of using the black volcanic rock cliffs as a backdrop to create tonal contrast. I also knew, I suppose, that I didn’t want the cliff walls in focus; they were messy, with not only birds (which are probably the source of light for the out-of-focus highlights) but numerous streaks of guano.

But, as in many cases, I “followed standard compositional guidelines” without conscious thought, simply by instinct 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.

One of the most common challenges in landscape photography communicating the scale of large objects. Photographs seem to resist conveying the sense of scale we often feel in a landscape. When we take the photograph, we have the opportunity to move around in the landscape, to hike a half-mile and notice that our view of the mountain hasn’t changed much. Our brains unconsciously integrate that information into our perceptions of the world around us. Viewers of our still photographs see things much differently.

Small prints and web images are particularly challenging. Our minds seem to resist  perceiving  a mountain that stretches a mile into the air within a photograph that fits inside a lunch box. Even large prints sometimes seem to lack any real ability to communicate the size of the landscape they portray.  As a result, rather than relying on making large prints, we have to understand how our brains perceive scale in still images, and take advantage of the cues our brains use in that process.

The simplest approach for communicating the scale is by comparison. It’s easy enough to fill the frame with a large mountain, but if you put a very large tree next to it, and the tree appears very tiny in the image, the mountain will seem bigger. Our brain knows the tree must be big, so the much, much larger mountain has to be enormous!

Since we want the smaller (and usually nearer) object to appear tiny, we’re trying for something very different than the near-far composition. In a near-far composition, a wide-angle perspective helps us render near objects very large. In trying to make a grand-scale photograph of a mountain, however, we want to render the “nearby” objects as small as we can, which will usually require a telephoto perspective.

Cerro Torre does just that. Here I aligned a small hill (and the trees on it) with the looming spires of Cerro Torre in the background. I shot from a distance, back along the trail, leaving the hill small in comparison to the mountains. Because the hill was shaded by clouds, the trees were silhouetted, which actually made them easier to recognize as trees. And when we can tell that those little forms are full mature trees, it’s not hard for us to feel the enormous scale of these iconic rock towers.

Another way we can establish a sense of size in a photograph is by first establishing a sense of distance, and letting our natural sense of perspective fill in the scale. Mt. Oberlin Alpenglow makes good use of this technique. The nearby trees are sharp and contrast-y, but the distant mountains are slightly muted by haze. We grasp that the mountains must be much farther away than the nearby trees, and that in turn helps us see the scale of the mountain. (The trees on the mountain itself, by appearing small, help that impression as well.)

Pink Morning Mists takes advantage of both techniques. The mists surrounding the mountain contribute to a sense that it is more distant than the hills (which is true, but perhaps not quite so much as the mists imply!), and that really imparts a sense of scale and grandeur to the mountains. But foreground ranches and hills below the mountain, again rendered small with a telephoto perspective, are also important to us “seeing” the size of the mountain in this image.

Very few things in nature photography are as disappointing as making an image of a big, glorious landscape and having the image fail to communicate that sense of immensity. Fortunately, we can often recreate some of that feeling with these simple composition techniques.

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.

Just as I often turn to wide-angle lenses when I want to create images with a sense of depth and perspective, when I purposefully want to lose a sense of depth, when I want to compress elements of an image in order to abstract or combine them, then I’ll often look to the longer end of my over-abundant collection of lenses.

First, it’s worth acknowledging that, pedantically, telephoto lenses don’t change perspective (warning: PDF document).  Seen from the same point, two objects will change in size, but proportionally, when you change lenses. Of course, if you change your shooting position to compensate for the new focal length, that’s a different matter entirely. So I’ll avoid saying that telephoto lenses change the perspective in a scene.

But there is a real, identifiable “look” to images we extract out of a scene using a long telephoto lens. We often talk about telephoto images as looking “flat” or “compressed”, these images do not seem to trigger our visual system into perceiving an illusion of depth in the image the way that many wide-angle shots do. Where does that look come from? I believe it primarily comes from two factors.

First is this matter of shooting distance. If we shoot along a row of pickets in a fence, and we’re close to the fence, the distant pickets will appear a lot smaller in the frame than the nearer ones will. As we’ve described above, to make a similar shot with a telephoto lens we’ll move farther from the fence, leaving the pickets more similar in size when we do photograph them. When the pickets vary in size, our brains actually are able to make use of that information, we really do perceive a sense of depth there. Even when the objects in the scene are quite different; if we’re familiar with the real-world scales of the object in a scene our brains will do a great job of interpreting depth based on that information.

Second, in photographing distant objects in a scene, the effects of haze often seem to play a part in our perceptions as well. In looking over series of distant mountain ranges, haze may reduce the contrast to the point where we see little detail in the scene, except for edges between those ridges, reducing the image to an almost cartoon-like character. This is a great tool for simplifying and abstracting an image.

There are limits to this trickery, the primary one comes from depth-of-field. If our goal is to remove depth from a scene, we need the elements in it to all be in pretty sharp focus. Telephoto lenses, all other things being equal (same shooting distance, same sensor pixel size) will keep a smaller range of distances in the image in acceptable focus. (But mind the way I’ve said that, if you frame that question differently, you get a different answer.) In some scenes it can be impossible to get everything in focus, even at f/22 or f/32. Even if you can get everything in focus at f/32, the long shutter speeds you might need to compensate might leave unable to create the shot you envisioned.

Despite these limitations, telephoto compressions are a fun, easy way to create wonderfully abstract images, particularly with distant objects that form a sequence or pattern. Give one a try!

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.

One of the more common idioms in landscape of photography is the near-far composition, a powerful technique for creating depth and relationships within a photograph.

In a near-far composition, a small foreground element is emphasized and placed in a background that establishes context for that element. For example, the dead bush in Bleached Bush Skeleton, the bush remains are the subject of the photograph. The lake, the tufa in the lake and the Sierra Nevada all tell us something about the location the bush remains are in.

Put another way, if you were to try and write a sentence describing what a near-far photograph is about, it would usually be something like, “This foreground (thing) is in the background (environment).”  The foreground object is the subject of the sentence, it is in general the more important of the two elements in a near-far image.

When I say that the foreground is emphasized, it’s important to be clear about how that’s done. For the foreground to be comparable in size to the background, it needs to be much closer to the lens than the background. While it might seem in theory that this could be accomplished with almost any sort of lens, the smaller depth-of-field of telephoto lenses often make it impossible to keep near and far objects both in focus. As a result, the most dramatic near-far compositions are usually made with wide-angle lenses. Hyperfocal focusing is often used to create the greatest depth-of-field.

Sometimes a near-far composition can work well even if the background is out of focus, but only if the backgrounds stays identifiable. In some situations this can be a benefit, blurring away small distracting details, and/or helping the eye gravitate first to the foreground object. But be conscious of whether the viewer can still “see” what the background is–once you’ve blurred the background to the point where, they can’t, you may still have a great photograph but it’s not a near-far composition, and the meaning of the photograph is changed as a result.

Don’t shy away from getting quite close to your foreground subject. With that wide angle lens, your small foreground object just won’t be that emphatic unless it’s close to the lens. This will require a lot of patience in carefully adjusting the position of your tripod, careful attention to depth-of-field, and occasionally a bit of yoga to see through the viewfinder.

The emphasis of the foreground is, well, an emphasis on the foreground. If you’re emphasizing it, make sure it’s interesting. One of the most common mistakes I see in students trying out near-far like compositions are weak foreground subjects. If you’ve got a field of flowers and you want to make one the star, it’s essential that you spend some time searching through the field for a good one.

Near-far compositions are simple, and common enough that you won’t have trouble finding dozens of other examples to investigate. But that shouldn’t deter you from creating your own. The reason near-far compositions are common is that they work, providing a method for communicating depth, power and relationships within an image. Give ’em a try, and drop me a link to some of your own near-far images, I’d love to see them!

East of California’s Sierra Nevada, north of Mono Lake lies the abandoned mining town of Bodie, California. Bodie boomed after the discovery of gold ore in the 1870s, by 1920 the town was in a steep and never-reversed decline. In 1962 the area was designated a California state historic park and remains that today. Several aspects make Bodie a particularly interesting target for photographers intrigued by the Gold Rush era ghost towns.

First and foremost Bodie is maintained in a state of arrested decay, that is, the park attempts to maintain Bodie the way it was in 1962, repairing what’s necessary to maintain that state but no more so. Interiors of many of the town’s buildings buildings still contain original furniture and such. And because Bodie hasn’t been commercially developed, it’s easy to find many places to take unique, “timeless” photographs without anachronisms.

Photographing Bodie does come with a few logistical challenges, however. The first is that the park is generally not open at sunrise and sunset, and in general it’s impossible to get inside most of the buildings to photograph. Don’t let this deter you. With nearly 200 buildings in the town one could spend months working exteriors. But if you want to photograph more (and you will want to), there are solutions to both of these problems,   through organized photographic events.

The Friends of Bodie and Bodie SHP have each summer a Photographer’s Day event each month on the third Saturday, May through October. For $50 (at least in 2009) this will get you access to the  park from a half-hour before sunrise to a half-hour after sunset. This can provide hours of quieter access to the park, which is great for working wider views of the town.

Photographing inside the buildings seems to require taking a photographic workshop that’s made arrangements with the park. The Friends of Bodie organize some of these workshops, you might also check out Jill Lachman, and the Fall Mono Basin Photography workshops given by Richard Knepp through the Mono Lake Committee (which some years includes time in Bodie).

A few quick tips for folks photographing Bodie for the first time:

First, Bodie is at over 8,000′ elevation. The dark sky there shows polarization artifacts easily. If you’re including the sky in your shot, leave off the polarizer (or use it very, very judiciously.)

Second, take advantage of windows. Reflections of the landscape and/or other buildings in a window can be very effective particularly in good light, views through multiple windows can also create pleasing compositions.

Third, don’t forget to look for details. It’s great to get wider shots of whole buildings or sections of town, but sometimes the smaller scenes (a table set for lunch covered in dust, a globe sitting in a window) can evoke feelings more powerfully than something on a larger scale.

Finally, if you’re trying to create a “timeless image of the past”, take a careful look at the scene you’re photographing. While anachronisms (building number posts, padlocks) are small and  infrequent, the fact that you don’t see much that isn’t “timeless” in Bodie can keep you from remembering to take a closer look.

Many of the ghost towns I’ve visited in the past have left me photographically uninspired. Usually either the ravages of time have left little trace, or commercialization has turned the ruins into an amusement park. Bodie is something different, an outdoor museum in the middle of nowhere, and a time machine into the past. Check it out!