Earlier this month a strange thing happened to me. Twice. The first two times I opened John Sexton’s Listen to the Trees I got stuck on an image and couldn’t move onward. The image is beautiful and compelling in a very subtle way. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out why it was such a strong image. After a good 20 minutes, during the second time around studying the image, I started seeing things that revealed why the image is visually compelling and what makes it work. And, to steal a line from the Intelligence Squared podcast, that has the makings of a great blog post.

In studying images, while there is value to simply looking at as many quality images as possible that reach out and move you, there are limits with that approach. Certainly, such images can inspire you, motivate you (or depress you), and can help you develop an intuitive visual sense - each of the above (well, except for the depression thing) is important in one’s photographic development. However, to learn the most possible from an image you need to spend some time with it and think about why it works, or sometimes why it doesn’t work. That latter point was an issue that arose with one of my own images, studied between my sessions with Listen to the Trees, which will likely form the subject of companion blog post . . . if I can figure out why it doesn’t work. So that’s what I was hoping to do with the John Sexton image - understand why an image I found particularly appealing worked. And in this case, the why was not so obvious.

I’ve struggled with how to present my thought process in this post. After rejecting a couple of terrible ideas, I’ve decided to simply describe my thinking and hope that my words can provide sufficient guidance for you to follow on the image . . . and to repeat the image several times in the post so you don’t have to scroll up and down to look at the image while you’re reading.

So here it is: John Sexton’s Glowing Aspens, Castle Creek Valley, Colorado from his book Listen to the Trees. I’ve copied the image from the book to use in this post.

Glowing Aspens, Castle Creek Valley, Colorado from the book "Listen to the Trees" by John Sexton ©1991 John Sexton. All rights reserved.

When I first saw it I was mesmerized. My eyes roamed the image and, as time passed, I felt like I could hear the breeze blowing through the trees, just like with the aspens we planted in our back yard. Then I started doing what I do with most images I want to understand, which is think my way through it because, quite frankly, I couldn’t figure out why it worked so well. And I’d love to be able to photograph a stand of trees like this and have it not come out as total chaos.

There was, of course, the quality of light falling on the trees. A soft, indirect light - whether from overcast skies, pre-dawn, post-dusk, or from being on the shadow side of a mountain, I’m not sure - is essential for this type of near-shadowless image. The light source comes in from the right, gently though, so the right edge of the tree trunks are highlighted, darkening as it curves around the front of the trunk. And then that wonderful characteristic of aspen groves that Joe Cornish pointed out in one of his images I studied earlier this year - that the trunk will lighten slightly on the “shadow” side of the tree, glowing from light that reflects from the other white-trunked aspens. (This is, in part, why Ann and I are timing our fall trip to photograph the aspens in Utah.)

However, understanding the light was the easy part for this image. An image this compelling doesn’t get that way with only beautiful light.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m very conscious of the edges of the frame, in fact I believe that the frame is one of the aspects of photography that distinguishes it from other graphic arts. One of the things I do when making images is to give a final look at the corners and the edges of the frame to make sure that nothing is intruding or disturbing the edge, because so often that disturbance immediately grabs the eye and distracts from the image. So naturally, when I start to carefully examine an image, that’s one of the first things I do after absorbing the image as a whole.

It’s nearly impossible to be in a forest and get a clean bottom edge, so the vegetation along the bottom doesn’t disturb me. In fact, the darker bottom helps settle the image as does the distance between the edge and the base of that first row of trees. But as my eyes worked their way up the edges of the frame, I noticed confluences between tree trunks and the edges on both sides - something that I, personally try to avoid because of the many instances where it has detracted from what I had intended with my image. All too often, despite my best efforts, I’ll miss that distraction as I’m making the exposure.

I wondered whether there was a framing that could have “cleaner” side edges, so I grabbed a couple of white sheets of paper. I laid one along the left side of the image and moved it inward, stopping just before it touched the second larger tree from the left. There’s a gap between some background trees there that would yield a clean edge. I placed the other sheet on the right edge, and moved it inward, unsure whether to place it just to the left of the thin dark tree standing mid-way back, or a bit more to the left of that, just past the small white tree next to it. Then I studied my cropping. Something was lost. The framing was too tight and, more importantly, the image lost a sense of openness that I enjoy about the image. I pulled the sheets away and the image opened up again. And the convergences towards the upper corners really didn’t matter. It’s framing decisions like that, if you get wrong in the field, you cannot recover from. In this case I probably would have framed it too tightly if I had been there. Face it, I’m no John Sexton!

I was still at a loss about why the image worked. But I’d been at it for nearly an hour and it was time for me to start work, so nothing to do but set the image aside and try it again.

I returned to Listen to the Trees a couple of days later and started where I’d left off in the book, thinking I’d move on to other images. But I couldn’t proceed. Glowing Aspens, Castle Creek Valley, Colorado grabbed my attention again and so I decided to study it some more. There was a reason why John Sexton photographed these trees, why he placed the camera where he did, and why he framed it the way he did (not to mention the decisions he made in printing the image). Some or much of his decision making may have been intuitive, but this type of image is not made by accident or luck. I didn’t have to figure out which decisions were conscious decisions; to learn from it I only had to figure out why the image works as a whole, and to be attentive when I’m out in the field.

After about 20 minutes of carefully examining the image, things started to unfold. The first thing I realized is how the bases of the trees recede away from the front row of trees on the two bottom corners. It’s this stepping back of the trees, the opening of the bottom corners (and the darker tones), that gives the image the sense of openness that my cropping exercise had eliminated. I also suspected there was some edge burning (darkening) that helped guide the eye away from the edge of the image and back towards the central area. That goes a long way to eliminating the potential distraction.

As I just stared at the image for a few more minutes, and despite being attracted to the visually brighter central tree (another technique to attract the eye), the third larger tree from the left (the left-most of the four front-row trees) visually started moving forward, as if it were located closer than the others. Which it isn’t - just look at the bases of the trees. If one looked attentively at the overall image, it was somehow the most prominent tree of the grove, despite the brighter central tree. The question is why? As I studied the image further, focusing on that tree to the left, my eye then gravitated to the right, to an unobstructed row of trees receding to infinity (about a quarter of the way into the frame from the right, between the first and second front-row trees from the right). It dawned on me that the receding space created by the trees counter-balanced the tree on the left that seemed to advance forward.

Then as my eye shifted back to the preeminent tree, I realized that on either side of that tree is another row of unobstructed trees that lead the eye backwards . . . to focus on the main tree. Instead of receding to infinity, it emphasizes the tree. The same visual technique (receding rows of trees) is used to to both show space and to emphasize a subject - on balancing sides of the image. If John Sexton had placed his camera a few inches left or right, that effect would have been lost.

The more I thought about it, the more I’ve realized that the bright central tree, the emphasized tree to the left and the receding perspective to the right help move the eye around and through the image and encourages the eye to further explore the image, making what appears to be a static image very dynamic.

As I carefully examined the remainder of the image, I noticed that in-between the front rows of trees are distinct spaces that produce a zig-zag effect between the bases of the tree and the closest of the trees behind, which further adds to the sense of depth of the image. If this area had been overgrown with bushes or sapling trees, I suspect that effect would have been lost.

I ended that second session with one outstanding question in my mind - how important is that rock near the center bottom of the image? It isn’t particularly prominent. But as I placed my thumb over it, the image seemed much less grounded. It is indeed an essential element. A couple of days later I showed the image to Ann and she pointed out that the rock is at the starting point of a lighter-toned pathway that curves upward and to the right towards the center of the frame, inviting one into the forest; just as the receding row of trees does on the right side of the image, and a less obvious receding row to the far left.

As I’ve returned to this image, again and again over the past week I’ve come to understand that Glowing Aspens, Castle Creek, Colorado amazingly manages the chaos of a forest through the careful use of camera placement and framing, and utilizes a few subtle compositional techniques that add depth and life to the grove, and most importantly, captures a sense of presence and of being there in the image. Ultimately, a photograph is about one’s experience of it, and this one succeeds.

All too often we see dramatic images of landscapes that speak as much, if not more, about the photographer’s use of compositional and developing techniques than about the subject. Here, as in all of John Sexton’s work, it is the subject that is supreme, and all else is in service of revealing that subject in a photograph.

I think it says much that technique is so well hidden in an image as captivating as this. It’s there, it’s doing what it is supposed to do, but the viewer isn’t distracted by it. Quite the opposite, one’s appreciation of the subject is unconsciously enhanced by it. Which is how it should be.

I’ve studied a few more images in Listen to the Trees since undertaking this exercise, and I am consistently stunned at how elegantly and seemingly effortless John Sexton’s images appear. His ability to use the simplest of techniques to bring order to the chaos that exists and to reveal the beauty within the forest is quite simply amazing. It appears to be simple and easy, but it’s not. That’s why John Sexton is a master.

If you love beautiful, thoughtful photographs, don’t hesitate to buy any of John Sexton’s books (I own Listen to the Trees and Quiet Light). They are all exquisitely printed and you will thoroughly enjoy his images.

Last, I would like to thank John Sexton. I wrote to him requesting permission to use his image in this post and he graciously consented with a personal response. I feel honored and I hope that this post conveys at least some of the gratitude that I feel for John’s photographs.

Why does it work?

Thanks for visiting!

Why does it work?

Find a Stage

Cropping and Format Ratio Ramblings

Thanks for visiting!