What am I photographing?
Photographers have to learn that some beautiful senes don’t yield good photos. Part of the solution to that is knowing what you’re taking a picture of.
The human eye is absolutely amazing. We have binocular vision and continually focus and refocus. That combination lets us enjoy a scenic view and its details nearly simultaneously. The most expensive camera I know of, a Hasselblad H6D-100C, is also amazing. But, the nature of still photography is that not every beautiful scene we see with our eyes translates to a great photograph—even if you spend as much on a camera as on a car.
A scene may be beautiful because we can take it all in and study the different parts of it. To make a great photograph, however, we need a focal point and a design that uses the whole composition to highlight that focal point. I ran into this problem recently.
Near Barnardsville, North Carolina, I was waiting for the sun to get high enough to illuminate the leaves of an American beech tree. That tree is one that doesn’t always drop its leaves in fall. I’ve long loved their pale luminescence in an otherwise dull winter woodland.
Driving up the road, the morning sun of golden hour was lighting up Walker Creek. I stopped and made this photograph. The scene was beautiful, and I enjoyed adjusting my polarizing filter to get the right balance between reflections and saturation. Here’s what I came up with.
24mm View
I pretty quickly realized, however, that there was nothing to draw the viewer in. My human eye and brain let me look around the scene and enjoy the beautiful light, the cool air, and the sound of the running water. Yet, a still photograph needs to invite the viewer into the scene. As pretty as that foreground water was, it didn’t do the trick.
Not one to give up, I switched to a longer focal lenth. I thought I could turn the dead tree spanning the creek into a focal point. Here’s my try at that.
Tighter View
It just didn’t work. That’s okay. Digital photography gives immediate feedback and a minuscule marginal cost for experimenting. There will be more beautiful streams in golden hour. If there’s some foreground interest, I’ll break out my tripod. If it lacks foreground interest, I’ll just get my chair out and savor the moment.
On the other hand, I recently made a photograph without any obvious focal point that I think works.
This photograph lacks a focal point and a photographer I really respect thinks there’s too little foreground. Yet, I like the sense of motion in the clouds and the expanding patch of yellow flowers. They draw your eye from the top down to the bottom and then to the right. Folks accustomed to reading western texts are used to that top left to bottom right flow. Maybe that’s why I think this photo works. I hope you do too.