Stable balance left to right

Visited the geographical center of the US once just to see what was there.  It was interesting to think about how you would determine such a site.  Of course it would involve surveyors, transits, complicated instruments and calculations by men huddled around a table littered with maps and such.  Right?  How else would you pinpoint the exact center of the country?

Simple – balance a cut-out map of the US on a pin and where the map balances flat is the center.  And that’s how they determined it.

Elegant solutions are so great if for no other reason than here’s one that can be repeated by any class of 4th graders in the country.

We generally crave balance, a position of moderate force in all directions acting equally on each other.  It’s so important to many things in our lives from bicycles to skyscrapers to bridges to ballerinas that we take it for granted, as if nature continually moves toward finding balance.  Not exactly.  Physicists tell us the universe strives toward unbalance, a state of disorder measured by an increase in entropy.  Still, we continue to find a sense of stability where balance is provided.

Photographers generally prefer balance as well, guiding a viewer through a scene in an expected way, allowing the mind the dwell on particular aspects measured against other elements.  There are even rules about this, advising where to put dominant subjects and how to use design elements to highlight or diminish certain parts of a scene in order to push the viewer to or from that area in the image.

ISO 100, 80mm, 1/400 sec., f/8

This scene was intentionally balanced as much as possible.  I saw the scene emerging as the ship moved across the horizon toward the breakwater opening and the sunlight moved across the water as the clouds blew by.  The horizontal lines are easy – the line of the horizon (which is never to be in the center of a picture unless it needs to be), the lines of dark and light on the water mirrored in similar lines in the sky.  The line of the ship balanced against the line of the breakwater.  There’s even a balance between the light on the beacon and the ship in the shade of a cloud.  It took three shots to get the sunlight on the water just the way I wanted but the wind was blowing briskly and I could see the openings for the sun would line up in the space of just a few minutes to get the beacon in just the right spot.

Sunlight has been absent here for a week so it was great to finally have some contrast to work with.  Might be all we get for a while…

By the way, if you’re in the Milwaukee area drop by the Art Museum to see the special exhibit on color photography  Color Rush.  It’s a great historical look at the development and use of color from autochromes to Kodachrome.  In it you can see how balance has played an emerging role in photography once color became an alternative to B&W.

Lines, subtle and otherwise

ISO 100, 93mm, 1/100 sec., f/8

Our eyes love to follow lines.  They entice us to gaze along their stretch, luring us from point of origin to point of ending.  They enclose objects of interest or carry our sight away from places the photographer wants us to ignore.  Multiply them and their seduction becomes overwhelming, taking an act of will by the viewer to look elsewhere in the frame.  This image is full of lines – lines that curve around the middle, lines that stand straight to the sky, lines that disappear into the distance, horizontal lines that ground their part of the scene to the earth.  The content becomes secondary to the myriad of lines.

ISO 100, 62mm, 1/320 sec., f/8

Here are lines real and possibly imagined, skewed and angled, straight and level.  The breakwater comes out of shadow to shine warmly against the cool lake water, which defines a ruler-straight horizon behind it.  The sunbeams (are they really there?) point upward to the sun, angling their vectors to bring the viewer down into the space below them and on through the horizontal barrier and into the lake.  The cloud layers imitate the horizon in a ragged manner, putting multiple ceilings across the sky to hold the view in place.

We are sensitive to lines and to patterns that break lines to stand out.  Evolution has programmed us to survive by being this sensitive, aware of the normality of pattern and sharply attentive to the pattern breaking danger.  For civilized man art has broadened our appreciation beyond the glance necessary for survival to see the expression essential to a fuller life.

The shape of things to see

Went out yesterday specifically to look for patterns at the edge of melting snow.  The idea just popped into my head as I was wondering how to do a better job of capturing the texture of snow, since simply making an image of a snowbank doesn’t give me what I want.  As it turns out, the exercise became a study in negative space (of a sort) as I saw that what was around the melting snow was equally as interesting.  Let me show you.

ISO 100, 35mm, 1/80 sec., f/14

I started seeing some sort of yin/yang compositions where the snow had melted off high spots and remained in the depressions.  Not only is there a contrast between the light and dark areas but since I was looking around in a sandbox, there is a contrast of textures as well.  The sun is about a hour from setting so the low angle cuts across the top of the peaks and reveals the snow texture as well as the sand pebbles.

ISO 100, 53mm, 1/125 sec., f/10

Light and dark, shadow and highlight, edge and pattern.  What is the subject of the image?

ISO 100, 35mm, 1/160 sec., f/11

Where the snow has thinned enough for the darker sand to start showing through I’m able to see the snow’s texture better.  Light requires shadow in order to illuminate?

ISO 100, 100mm, f/14, 6 image HDR

The last image is simply to practice capturing the subtle gradations of tone as the sunlight curves along the gradual slope of the snow.  The transition from light to dark is a fraction of a degree of angle, and right at that point you can see the irregular surface mottling where the snow has melted at different rates.  Macro textures and micro textures – snow has it all.

Shape the image you want

One of the pleasures of large format photography is you have so much image to play with.  What I mean by that is you can crop to various compositions and still retain details in the image.  I use 4×5″ film which is scanned as big as I want depending on how much cropping I want to perform without losing much resolution.  If I expect to crop a lot I will scan to a greater number of pixels; crop just a little then scan to a more “normal” number of pixels.  I see no reason to scan every image to 150-200 megabytes if I plan to use the whole image.  Unless, of course, I want to print wall-sized images!

But why crop an image at all?  Aren’t you supposed to get the image you want in the camera in the first place?  Well, different compositions elicit different emotional responses.  Some open your mind to questions (what is that? what is the photographer saying?), some direct your eye to the subject readily, some are pleasing proportions of length and width – there are multiple reasons you might crop in order to deliver a certain response.  And different crops, as different compositions, tell different stories.  With digital cameras this seems like an easy issue to address – just make more images with different compositions.  But one camera and a couple of lenses may not offer sufficient flexibility for your desired image.  And with film you can’t just shoot a hundred variations on the scene (well, not economically at least).  For example, take this image:

This is a somewhat wide shot of a scene in a nearby park.  I liked the strong contrasts between the trees and snow, and the leading line of the snow-covered path pointing to the horizon.  It’s a general shot, nothing really stands out.  But it can be cropped in several ways.

Now there’s more emphasis on the path with the trees as framing elements.

This crop emphasizes the verticality of the trees and shows some of the details of the snow plastered on the side of trunks.

A little closer to the path than the original image, bringing the horizon closer.  Cropping down the top and bottom of the scene provides a wider perspective that focuses the eye along the trees.

Square is a pleasing crop (better when there is more subject than a white sky and white ground) and this one brings more emphasis on the path and reveals a possible subject farther away.

A closer crop makes the path more intimate and now the person walking their dog shows up on the trail as does the snow covered bench on the side.  Essentially this is what I would get by mounting a telephoto lens on the camera but all I had to do here is crop in tight on my already existing image – no lens changes required.

The digital camera companies seem intent on continuing their megapixel war of numbers.  For the vast majority of photographers a suitable file size was passed a couple of years ago but if you frequently find yourself in the position of cropping images a lot you might consider the higher number models.  Especially where there are no lenses that will deliver the composition you like.

Or you could step back and try large format photography!

Handtools for crafting photographs

We have this marvelous product of evolution that enables us to comprehend patterns very quickly.  It’s almost like the muscle reflexes we’re familiar with – jerking away from a hot surface, blinking when something suddenly moves toward our face – but in a visual sense that we look, and almost immediately recognize without thinking too hard about it.  Some people do it better than others but this might just be due to practice, experience, knowledge or age.  Nonetheless, it’s a tool photographers can take advantage of when composing an image.  Consider it a shorthand for visual elements where I don’t have to show you each and every one because in a glance your brain will fill in what’s needed.

Take this image:

Nothing particularly compelling about it, unless you think like prey.  What is that object in the middle?  You’ve probably already identified it but suppose I enlarge it 400%:

Yeah, now it’s clear what it is and if  you’re a small, ground dwelling animal it’s probably time to take cover.

So why was this so easy?  Because of a couple of elements we’re familiar with.  A big bird with dark wings that is light in the front and back (take a look at that first picture – you can see these elements) is probably a bald eagle; there are so few other birds that look this way in our country.  And because of our cultural bias in the US from seeing bald eagles in imagery just about everywhere.  We expect to see these elements so a glance is all we need to confirm we’ve seen what we expect.  There are lots of other elements serious bird watchers will use to identify a bald eagle but for most people you just need to see these two (dark wings, light front and back) in a glance.

Notice even in the fuzzy enlarged version most people would instantly recognize the bird, just from the elements I mentioned.  I could probably put up a blurred version of this same image and people would still get it right.  These elements on a big bird are just too ingrained in our cultural experience.

Can our glances be fooled, though, or influenced by other factors?  Possibly.  Here is a pair of examples – what is the influence here?

The elements are the same – horizontal and vertical lines based on contrasting luminance between trees and snow.  Which is easier for you to see these, though?  I’m betting it’s the black and white one because the color tends to distract you in the first one.  The color implies there’s something else important in the image when actually there’s not.  I just wanted to show off lines in the forest.  Learning to “see” in black and white is a useful skill in order to compose like this – I’m just learning how to pay attention enough to achieve it.  Converting to black and white in digital is a great way to learn how to use this tool effectively and it’s fun to see for yourself how some images work great without color and some just die when it’s gone.

And then there’s our inability to see two things at once, even when they are right in front of us.  For example:

Remember those posters you had to stare at in order to see the 3D image embedded in them?  You’d stare and stare and stare, and then suddenly the image would form right in front of you.  Lots of advice surrounded them – relax your eyes, look beyond the poster, glance at it casually – but no advice would result in your ability to see the 3D image as well as the design on the poster.  It’s either one or the other.  The images above are like that.  The first one was made with a polarizer and the second one without.  Light reflected off the surface of water is polarized anyway so added a polarizer in front of your lens and turning it to maximum effect really wipes out most of the reflection.  Yet both scenes are reality taking place before our eyes.  There’s no “right” or “wrong” image – there’s just what you want to portray.  But the photographer has to decide which suits the purpose best because the viewer can’t see both simultaneously.

When you start to think about photography as an exercise in visual imagery you realize there are all these tools available for you to use in constructing an image that tells your story.  We think about painters creating a composition, placing elements where they want and portraying light to the best possible advantage.  Photographers may not have quite as much flexibility but we do have the means to craft imagery that appeals to the viewer.  It’s more than which lens and how many megapixels – you’ve got to really see what you’re looking at before you even get the camera out of the bag.

 

Spread things out a bit

I’ve been seeing this type of display from other landscape photographers so I thought I’d try it out.  I like the play on lines – horizontal and vertical – between the elements of the image and the framing.  It feels like it works with this image, which is soft and hazy, because there are so few sharp edges in the actual image to conflict with the hard lines of the framing.

What do you think of opening up a photograph in this fashion?

Blazing photography trails

Talk to enough young photographers who are beginning to be successful getting their work into commerce or galleries and you’ll hear a common refrain, “no body cares what equipment you use or how hard it was to get the shot, they only care about the image.”

Photography seems to be somewhat unique among the arts in that fixation on the gear is almost equal to consideration of the product.  Can you imagine complimenting a painter on the quality of their brushes or a sculptor on the type of chisels they use?  Or about the adventures encountered while traveling to create their pieces?  Never seems to come up but listen to conversations between patrons and photographers and gear quickly enters the discussion.

Well, since this is apparently the only place I CAN talk about these things, I offer for your consideration the following:

Wild Goose Island, Glacier National Park, ISO 100, 26mm, 1/160 sec., f/5.6

I believe this is the only island in the whole park, making it one of the most photographed elements in the area.  To the left of this perspective is a nice pull-off where you can walk a few feet off the road and get a great sunrise photo of the island and the lake.  To the right of this perspective is a large, paved overlook that provides a view of the lake and the island in the distance.  Both vantage points are usually filled with photographers and one of those scenes will show up in everyone’s bunch of photos from the park.  I have numerous versions of each.

My issue with those two choices is the sun is either fully in front of or behind the island, offering no contrast to give a sense of depth.  It’s only from the side you can get that view.  I wondered why there aren’t any images from that perspective, especially since the road follows the lake with a couple of pull-outs along the way.  And, from the western overlook I could see a couple of large rocks high on the shoreline above the island, devoid of trees.  I decided that is where I wanted to shoot from.

Five minutes into my hike to the rocks I discovered why I don’t see this image.

Between the storms and snow that assault the park every year, hundreds of trees get knocked over.  Since this is a national park, there is no logging allowed in the area so the trees just lay where they fall.  And since this is a generally cool, low humidity climate, any decay that takes places does so at a slow pace.  I figured this out when I discovered the small grass covered ridge I intended to use to reach the rocks was layered multiple times with fallen trees.  Not being able to even see the ground, I had to balance on rotting tree trunks immediately after leaving the road.  It took me 10 minutes to go 10 feet.  Not the route to take, obviously.

After backing out and trying another, more promising path, I realized this was the condition of the whole ridge, all the way out to the rocks I wanted to reach.  So the 100 yards from the road that would put me on the overlook for the image I wanted took around 30-45 minutes to cover, climbing over and under tree trunks and getting slapped in the face by wayward limbs.  Finally I did reach the exact spot I wanted, giving me the perfect perspective.  And clouds covered the sun.

OK, a few clouds are always welcomed in the sky to break up the monochrome of it all.  But I wanted sunlight on the island, sunlight on the little bay behind it, and possibly dappled sunlight on the ridge.  I could see openings in the clouds that ought to give the light I wanted, but it meant waiting for just the right set of conditions.  And the sun was setting by the moment.

And my wife was wondering if I’d fallen off the edge of the cliff.  Cellphones don’t work in the park and I was paying more attention to the changing light than wondering how to let her know I was delayed.  Guess a pair of those personal radios would be useful but it’s one more piece of electrical equipment to carry around (and put where with all my gear?) so we don’t have those.  I learned later she was blowing her emergency whistle to get my attention (which I finally heard on the way back) and wondering how to flag down a passing ranger to organize a search party.

But I did get a set of images I liked, such as the one above.  The workshop instructor told me it has a good sense of motion in the water and sky, contrasted with the solid rock that intermittently lit by the sun.  I like how the island and little bay are lit up while the water remains dark, as if a spotlight is on each.

And I made it back to the car generally unscathed.  I did learn you can press green leaves against a bleeding scratch to stop it, though.  And I didn’t stumble upon a bear in all the deadfall.  Not that either of us could have beat a very hasty retreat in that situation.

So, there’s my picture and there’s the back story, which I believe makes it a more interesting image than simply being a unique perspective of a popular photography subject.

Defining elements

Sometimes you just go where the lines lead you.  Thankfully, I’m starting to pay attention to lines and where they lead.

Down

Curved

Twisty

One exercise I perform to “see” better is to look at shadows, especially those that are distant from their source.  It’s a way of intentionally looking for negative space, of seeing a subject from a new perspective in order to learn something about it other than its primary shape.  Viewing shadows strips away the dimensionality of a subject, taking away cues like color, tones, foreground/background – reducing a subject to outline in a two-dimensional plane.  It gives me a way understand the essential elements of a subject, sometimes before I see the subject itself.

A friend of mine in college was in a technical design class where one of the exercises was to draw an object dimensionally but all  you were given was the shadow.  It’s surprising how simple a shadow can be cast by complex structures.  Just connecting the image of the final structure to its shadow was somewhat of a test in spatial relationships.  I remember that exercise whenever I go looking for shadows, the more surprising the better.

Start trying to find shadows where you look and the world takes on a character you may find novel.  Take the time to watch shadows change as the sun moves and you’ll learn a lot about a subject as well as how to project what something will look like at different times of the day.

 

Seeing what you feel

The great photographers who discuss their work and methods consistently agree on how to help the viewer see the image’s emphasis – move closer to compose.  Robert Capa is quoted, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” strong words from a photographer whose images show him in the midst of flying bullets and exploding shells.  As a landscape photographer I rarely suffer the impediments to moving close that Capa did, but sometimes have to remind myself of his dictum.

One challenge is continuing to see like the camera.  Although our eyes may see similar to the camera our brain does a great job of picking out a point of emphasis and paying attention to it while excluding other elements of the image.  To overcome this we have to essentially take seeing back from our brain and return it to our eyes.  People try closing one eye to compose (thus eliminating the distraction of three dimensions), using a composing card (just a piece of matte board with a cutout the proportion of the film or sensor size being used to help eliminate image elements), or walking around while watching a scene from different angles.  One technique I use is to create that first image, stop, look at it on the back of the camera and ask, “am I close enough?”  It helps.

What appears to get in my way is trying to convey the intimacy of a scene while capturing the broad elements that make it up.  Landscape photography isn’t macro – we need the larger elements to put the emphasis in context or provide contrast that directs the viewer to the desired element.  Getting really close loses that while standing farther back muddles the composition.  Here’s an example:

I saw this scene while wandering around looking for B&W images.  Because there are deer all over the park what initially struck me was how nice a spot this would be to lie down out of the wind and rain if I were a deer.  My initial impression was of the overhanging limb still tightly packed with leaves to provide cover, the dry grass underneath for insulation from the ground, and the open scene under the other trees to allow warning of approaching predators.  You know, thinking like a deer.  Still, looking at this first image I wasn’t happy it conveyed that cozy, intimate impression I was getting.  The area under the tree was too small in the overall image and all the other elements around it just cluttered up the scene.

This next composition satisfied me more.  I got closer to the area under the tree, bent over a little to put the camera at a “deer-eye” level and composed out some of the distracting elements in the first image by changing position.  I feel this one retains the sense of openness in the woods while also conveying the intimacy of the spot under the tree.  It was a small change – just stepped forward 3-4 feet, moved to a different side and bent over a little – but to the camera it made considerable difference.

The great landscape photographers amaze me at their skills to see and capture these intimate scenes.  For them it was truly the ability to see like the camera – film doesn’t give you a preview as feedback for the next composition.  One goal I have is to develop this degree of “sightedness” to not only capture the scene as I experience it but to identify the scene that caused the emotional reaction even before bringing my camera to my eye.