The Photographer's Dilemma - Part Two

This posting is actually the one I thought of doing first, before Part One with the photograph of the girl.  It’s the one that’s been on my mind since I first took the images in Voinjama.  However watching the Cartier-Bresson film raised  a more immediate, and easier to address, question than the one here, so that one came first.  And because it included that great quote by Koudelka, it made for a nice lead-in to this post.  

I’m struggling to find my words here, that’s why I didn’t post it earlier.  In fact, I’ve been struggling with these thoughts for years.  The question, well it’s not really a question, the issue is when you think you see something, and you want to figure out how to photograph it so that the photograph reveals what you see.  How do you critically examine the images that you produce?  Especially when there may be so many subtle variations of the same subject or scene (I’m largely talking about landscapes here).  Some photographs are relatively easy to make.  As Elliott Erwitt said in the Cartier-Bresson film, “it’s the same as taking pictures, you can’t find them when you’re looking for them.  They come and bite you.”  Some images just come and bite you.  They’re not necessarily easy to like, beautiful images, but they are clear as day when you see them and there is just something simply magical about it.  Other times that is not the case, and it is those times that I’m talking about.

For a time in my life, photography was a way for me to learn about the world.  It was a doorway for me to enter and see things and meet people I would not otherwise have encountered.  It was a vehicle for learning and understanding.  But like all learning, some things are easy and some are not.  And I’ve always struggled to make strong images of those things that are not easy to understand or to photograph.  This has become particularly more difficult (to have photography be something more than just making interesting images) now that I’ve returned to the medium after a 15 year hiatus, only to find that the technology itself has fundamentally changed.  Sometimes I think it is simply too easy to press the shutter with a digital camera (though I said the same with 35mm film when I would photograph mostly with a 4x5 camera), the results too immediate and the temptation too great to get at it that it is difficult to slow down and to think and look and see before pressing the shutter.  But that is a different issue.  The one here is how do you go about photographing when you think you see something, but you aren’t sure.

I encountered that frustration while in Voinjama.  First some background, which isn’t particularly significant other than elaborate on comments hinted at in earlier blog posts and to let you know that what I could do with regard to the subject was very limited given the circumstances.  I was shooting from the top of the hill will the radio towers in Voinjama.  My subject was a group of trees probably half a mile to the south on a hillside facing north, north west.  My view was obscured by a group of bushes so I asked Andrew to back the Land Cruiser up to the edge of the hill.  From there I climbed on top of the Land Cruiser with my super zoom lens and still had to hold the camera over my head, using the articulating LCD screen on the back to frame the images.  

I’ve been fascinated with some of the trees they have here, yet have been unable to get clear shots of them or to spend any real time photographing them.  This was my first opportunity and I wasn’t going to toss it away simply because of the distances involved and the fact that all I had to work with was zoom, framing and Lightroom.  

To give you an idea of what I was working with, here’s an unaltered image taken with the equivalent of a 180mm lens on a 35mm camera.

As you can see, there’s a lot of haze in the air due to the distance and if you look carefully on the bottom edge, you see some of the bushes I was trying to shoot over.  The tree just left and down from center is the one that caught my eye and made me ask Andrew to move the vehicle.  The images below center around a tree that is off to the right and a bit higher in elevation.

Each of the images below are taken from a group of 2 to 4 similar images taken with some slight framing adjustments between shots.  They represent fundamentally different compositions with the same tree.  The lens equivalents for these range between a 160mm to a 400mm lens.  The Lightroom work is minimal, in part because I have not worked extensively with it and have not really mastered its controls.  You could call these test prints to help me see if I was indeed seeing anything photographically and to help me determine if any of these are worth a lot of time and effort to make better.  Face it, none of these images bit me, the tree called my name to get my attention then shut up.  These images represent my struggle to figure out why I was attracted to these trees in the first place.  Last, they’re presented in the order they were taken.

1

2

3

4

5

So the photographer’s dilemma in this instance is the question of whether any of these images are worth pursuing with additional work.   Although it was much worse in the days of film where it could be months before you see the images you photographed, the question still arises - What was I thinking?  What was there that led me to stick with this tree and shoot what amounts to half a roll of film of it?  

Whatever it is, it doesn’t jump out and bite me.  Perhaps in this instance it was simply the process of struggling to see, to work with a subject and then the images to learn what, if anything is there.  That is the lesson.  In which case, it’s time to move on.  

For what it’s worth, when reviewing the images after they were downloaded, it was image number 5 that I worked with first.  Only later did I start looking at the other compositions and then working with them, in part, to do this blog post.  I can’t tell you why number 5, or why I stopped photographing the tree at the time other than I had that feeling that I either had it, or I didn’t.  I can say that I did only one other group of 4 images of another tree before I decided that I was ready to stop.  After nineteen presses of the shutter.