Yellowstone Intermission: Photography Lesson #1 - Follow the Light
Photographers, especially landscape photographers have an expression - Follow the Light!
The quality of the light is often what gives an image its character.Bad light can make a great subject look bad.Good light can turn an ok image to a good image, and a good one into a great image.There’s very few things worse for a photographer than being at a great location at the wrong time of day.That’s why we spend so much time scouting out good locations, figuring out when the best light will be for that location, and getting up well before the sun in the morning (and returning back to camp in the dark).It may mean another trip (or multiple trips) back to a location, but often it’s worth it.As often as Ann expresses frustration about how few decent images she thinks she makes in a day of shooting (its more than she thinks, but that’s another topic of discussion), I remind her that we’re fortunate if we really make one very good image in a full day’s worth of shooting.It’s hard to make an exceptional image.Very hard.And fascinating light often plays a role in exceptional images.
That’s why whenever we’re at a location photographing and light gets a special quality, you start looking at where that quality is the greatest and you try and find something (really, anything!) to photograph with that light.More often than not, it’s those images that will be worth the extra effort to develop further once you’re at home.
So while Ann and I were in the Norris Basin photographing, the sun was slowly setting until it finally reached that point where it was raking across horizontal surfaces and casting a golden glow on anything it hit.I can’t recall whether it was Ann or me that said, “Wow, look at the light!”But I do recall immediately looking around for something to photograph and my eyes quickly locking on tufts of grass a couple of hundred yards ahead of us on the trail.The light was hitting the grasses and not only making them glow, but casting lengthy shadows of everything along the fairly flat basin floor.
I hurried over and made a quick composition and some photographs - light like that rarely lasts long and you never want to fiddle about so long as to lose the light (which actually happened a couple of times this trip).So I made my exposures.
Not being content with that first composition, I started working on a better composition.While I tried to give some visual order to the grasses, I realized that the raking light was exaggerating the erosion lines on the surface of the ground and that, along with the shadows from the lumps on the ground could make a more visually interesting image than the grasses.So I moved over about 10-15 feet to the right and re-composed, hurrying to capture the image before the sun set behind the trees to the west.
Well, I did say that great light could turn pretty much anything into an interesting subject. In case it hadn’t occurred to you, all of those lumps are bison poop. It appears that following the light had led Ann and me to the Norris Basin bison bathroom. As Ann has heard me say way too often, “Take what you can get.” In this case it was great light and bison poop!