PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNEY.com

I never picked up a camera until I was in college, which is remarkable since my father tried many times through the years to coax me into taking up his favorite hobby. But you know how kids can be…

Anyway, when I finally began photography in earnest I fell immediately in love with it. Or perhaps infatuated may be a better word. I felt I loved photography, but in reality I knew very little about it.

I launched off snapping pictures wherever I could. In Iowa, where I went to school, that meant shooting on a lot of cold winter days. If you’ve ever been to Iowa, you may realize that while it is photogenic in some respects, the variety of photographic opportunities is limited. And since I was especially interested in landscape photography at the time, the opportunities were even more limited. I wanted to capture nature in all its beauty and the sad fact is, there is not a lot of pristine nature left in Iowa any more. Don’t get me wrong, the landscapes are still pretty there, but they would not qualify as “pristine.”

So I did what I could. I set out into local parks and small forests snapping pictures of trees. Trees in snow. Trees in sunshine. Trees near streams. Trees set against a blue sky. Trees. Trees. Trees.

How’s that for creativity?

Well perhaps one reason I had so much difficulty was that I had a very narrow idea back then of what made a picture. Not only that, I made the mistake of thinking trees were easy to photograph — they are not. Why? Because trees are fundamentally complex objects, with branches headed every which way. Photograph a tree and you will quickly learn that controlling the angle of view to keep distracting elements out of the picture can be extremely difficult. Photograph a bunch of trees, and if you’re like me, you will quickly give up trying.

Now, before anyone accuses me of being a tree-hater, let me say this: I love trees. And done right, photographing them can make for beautiful images. But the most powerful images of trees, I believe, are the ones where simplicity in form is born in mind at all times. Old, dead trees, their bark smoothed by decay. The famous Bristlecone Pines — the oldest trees on earth — of the Sierra Nevada. The tall forests of the Giant Redwood and Sequoia trees. Those are all beautiful trees. Or, you could argue, the wonderful Autumn colors of certain trees. But the bottom line is that when a photograph with trees works, it works because the image is simple and clean and the lines of the trees smallest branches do not provide a distraction.

Take the following, for example:

This was an image I made in Sedona, Arizona and it almost worked. I was struck by the beautiful blue reflection in the water combined with the green and orange algae in the water. It would have been gorgeous except for those darned dead branches intruding into the frame. I tried repositioning — it didn’t work because I lost the beautiful reflection. I tried zooming in tighter to crop out the trees — it didn’t work because I lost too much of the color. And in the end, I was left with an image I just couldn’t quite make.

But it’s worth stopping for a moment to understand why this photograph doesn’t work. It isn’t just that the tree branches intrude into the picture without having any real importance to the scene. Nor is it just the fact that they are complicated, with small branches headed in many different directions. Those are both real problems. But the bigger problem in this case is that the trees are the most brightly lit objects in the scene. As such, our eyes are immediately drawn to them above all else in the image. And in this case, that takes our eyes… nowhere.

I’ve written about the importance of colors in our photographs. But here is a rule that is just as important for black and white photographers: the eye will inevitably be drawn to the brightest part of an image first. And if that bright area isn’t really supposed to be there, then you’ve got a problem.

So remember when you head out to shoot, keep aware of the parts of a scene you don’t want. Crop them out if at all possible. And if they’re brightly lit as well, reposition until you can find an angle where they don’t intrude. And if you can’t, oh well. Just drop back, lower your camera, and admire the scene. Not everything is meant to be photographed.

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