Working the Image - Getting Closer
As I went through the images I’d made during our recent trip to the coast I noticed a definite pattern in my method of working. It falls into a variation of “working the image” that I’d discussed before, so I thought it might be useful to discuss in a post. Fortunately, there was a clean series of images that made a perfect example of what I was hoping to describe.
These are the images I made that led to the final image in the blog posts about our June adventure.
It started when my eye caught the light hitting a small clump of kelp that had washed up on shore and left stranded by the receding tide. Actually, it was only one part of the small clump on one side that managed to catch the light and seemed to glow.
The piece I was most interested in was less than a foot long. As I said, I was fascinated with what the light was dong to the translucent leaves. The rest of the kelp was a dark blob of inter-mixed leaves with no life to them.
The difference between looking at something and framing something in an image is tremendous. The eye has a wonderful ability to ignore everything you don’t want to see. That’s just not possible with a frame, i.e. a photograph. I didn’t want to include the uninteresting, dark blob in the image, so that made me push my subject way off to the right side of the frame. For me, that curved edge of the leaf to the right was critical to keep, as was finding a way to capture a bit of the glow in the leaves that original caught my eye.
I realized that the rest of the frame would be very boring with a too-close image, so I decided to play incorporate the shadows to the top of the image, as well as try and include some of the patterns in the sand, off to the left.
In the end, while somewhat interesting, the image didn’t nearly capture what I had originally been attracted to from a distance. So I moved around the kelp and got in closer.
This image gave me more of a sense of the light and color of the kelp. Again, I played with the curved edges of the kelp, this time on the top right corner, and used the flowing leaves to lead the eye to the central part of the image.
Still, that dark “hole” in the center left me wanting a bit, so I decided to stick with it and worked my way around the image even more.
It was then that I realized I would be able to play with a range of light and shadow made by layers of the kelp. Since I was a matter of inches away from the subject, framing became extremely difficult. I finally managed to frame the left edge and the top left where I wanted it. Unfortunately, I had to cut a bit off the top of the central “cone” because any higher introduced a blob of unpleasant mess. Some say photography is the art of exclusion and in this image, that was definitely the case.
Still, the end result is for me an interesting image that allows the eye to wander and explore the different forms, light, shadows and textures in the image.
Most of my other sequences of moving closer started from a much broader view, to a scale that was much larger than what I started with here. Still, the method is the same and one I should be conscious of. I’ll see something, get excited about it and then make an image of it. Rarely is that the best possible image, and often the image has way too much included in it - so I need to stick with it and move in closer and closer. Until I’m too close, then back up until it’s just right. And then of course, check to make sure I haven’t missed a better, wider view. But in all honesty that happens much less rarely than when I’ve walked away before getting closer for a better image.
This time, closer was definitely better.