Canyonlands Tree

Sometimes when you’re out and can’t quite find something grand to photograph, you settle on something simple and try to enjoy the craft of photography.  On our first trip out to the desert SW, a bit west of Moab in Canyonlands NP, I was faced with just that situation.  Looking back at that image recently I realized there was more there than I’d first thought so I decided to develop it with fresh eyes.

I’ve been working my eyes (and brain) out the past ten days or so drafting briefs and have half a week to go.  Think four 10,000 word research papers (with 8,000 pages of record materials to evaluate) to be done in two weeks and you get the idea.  Still, in my free time, Ann and I have been able to chat a bit about photography and various processes involved in making images, at all of the various stages of image making.  It’s a good break from thinking about the law or walking around like a brainless zombie.  Given that we’ve received some comments about folks appreciating when we open up a bit about how and why we do the things we do, I’ve decided to use that as motivation for blog posts.  That and the fact that such thinking will help me when I’m finally out photographing again and having to make decisions about whether to do this or to do that.  So that’s what this post is a bit about.  Why did I make this image and what went into making it.

We all wish that every time we go out we are presented with incredible grand landscapes to photograph, with perfect light and stunning weather conditions to boot.  That so rarely happens and this is a good example of  how things usually pan out.  This image was taken during the middle of the day, under clear blue skies and not much of a grand view at the location we drove to.  Still, once you arrive at a location, especially if you’ve driven for a bit to get there, you look for something to photograph because you don’t want to walk away with nothing.  For me, it became this tree.

Now, the image immediately below is the straight-out-of-camera jpg I made.  No cropping, no burning or dodging - nothing.  Usually I work in what’s called raw (and the bottom image is from the raw copy) because raw carries much more “data” in the file, which allows you to develop the image a lot more than the jpg equivalent.  Plus raw files have a much wider dynamic range, so it’s possible to deal with high contrast light situations.  Here, I got lazy (see the busting my butt at work part above) and decided to use the jpg to depict the image as I made it.  Fortunately, Fuji cameras consistently produce incredible jpgs, in part because of their understanding of color from their film division, so going with the jpg wasn’t a huge step down in visual quality.

We came to the overlook expecting a grand scene.  Unfortunately, it just wasn’t there.   You can see a bit of it off to the left.  Maybe it would have been better much earlier or later in the day when the sun was lower, but everything appeared flat in the mid-day sun (as it often does in such conditions) and everything seemed so distant.  So a landscape seemed a poor option.  

While I was attracted to this tree, I struggled with finding a good composition of it.  Often you’re having to contend with too many elements when composing an image, and while I’ve been in much worse situations, this one was relatively unforgiving.  In-between the various shadows from off-camera bushes (and actually, the shadow of another photographer) and the bushes within the frame, I had a hard time getting a satisfying composition..

While the base of the tree was fairly interesting, I couldn’t go any higher with my tripod because if I did the branches of the tree would merge with the bushes both in the foreground and in the background.  I remember moving off to the right to see about framing an image from there.  But while I was better able to get the base of the tree, the background was much worse and very disorienting, taking away from the trunk.  So I moved back to where this was taken without even trying to make a photograph from the other location.

At some point, I must have realized that I could work with the moon in the sky to the right (yeah, that speck of white is the moon).  So one focal point became having the branch on the right end of the tree point towards the moon.  Then it became an issue of finding out where my tripod had to go, and at what elevation to have the camera at so there wasn’t any merger with the tree branches or any of the bushes while still having the one branch pointing to the moon.  That meant moving left-right, up-down, backwards-forwards.  There was a spot where the rear bush fit into a gap in the tree branches, and that largely determined my location.

I can’t say whether I was aware that one of the broken branches of the tree merged with the front green bush.  It’s evident now and bugs me a bit.  It’s hard to be attentive to every little detail while you’re making photographs, but that doesn’t keep you from kicking yourself after the fact when there’s something fairly obvious you should have seen.  And, of course there is the loss of the tree base, a necessary but unfortunate sacrifice.

I decided that I could live with an open foreground to the right, particularly since it was darkened with the shadow and balanced a tit with the rocks to the left  And I remember being very careful to include the two tiny crossed sticks near the bottom edge of the frame..  One of the things you learn to do, especially if your camera is on a tripod, is to carefully examine your edges and your corners.  I think that’s one of the things that distinguished photography from a lot of other visual arts - the importance of framing the image and the preciseness of that edge - so I always try to be conscious of what’s going on in that respect.

Clear blue skies overhead are often a photographer’s dilemma.  Some people refuse to photograph with blue skies, but if you’re on a once-in-a-lifetime trip (little did we realize it wouldn’t be that , but . . . at the time . . .), you make the photograph.  Here, I decided I really wanted to try and deepen the blue sky to contrast with the green bushes in the lower half of the image.  So I plopped on a polarizing filter and turned it until it seemed right.  As I’m getting older I’m tending to not max-out the effect of the polarizer like I did in my youth, but this image seems close to it.  

The part of the frame that I’m really not happy with is the left.  The rocks running off the cliff and the distant clouds do nothing for the image.  It makes me wonder whether I was mentally cropping the image in my head.  I’ll save you my usual rant to Fuji (ok, no I won’t) about why the hell they can have multiple aspect ratios on their medium format cameras (4:3, 5:4, 7:6, 1:1, 3:2, 16:9, 65:24) but only (2:3, 1:1, and 16:9) on their APSC cameras?  And while I’m at it, why can’t Capture One download the image and automatically show it in the aspect ratio you took it at?  It’s only software!  Anyway, I wondered whether that’s what I was thinking, so I cropped it to my former large format camera ratio of 4x5 to try and eliminate the distraction. 

This is still the jpg of the image and, as you can see, no it didn’t eliminate the distraction, though it minimized it somewhat.  However, the crop has created a visual unbalance within the photograph, exaggerating the openness on the right side of the frame.  This definitely was not how I would have seen it at the time.

I have to confess that I highly doubt that I would have even considered this image in a square format in 2015.  That was just not part of my thinking process.  Back then I was still of the mindset that I hated the square format, or better, that I didn’t see in square.  Not that I hadn’t tried.  In the 1980’s I bought a Rolleiflex that, while enjoyable to use and a camera that made a few good images for me (again, back to how to scan my negatives), it really frustrated me compositionally.  I traded that camera for a lens that I used for architectural photography.  And while I was in the military I bought a cheap Yashicamat that . . . I eventually gave away.  It really wasn’t until a few years ago that I started seeing compositions in square so . . .

I know for a fact that I did not compose the image below in square because the square crop isn’t placed in the center of the image (where the camera crops it when set to 1:1).  Still, when I first looked at this image on the monitor earlier this week, that’s how I saw it - square.  First thing I did was crop the image.

I think this image captures what I was feeling at the time better than the images above.  With the raw file, I was able to get rid of the magneta cast from the sky and work the image to capture the harshness and textures in both the vegetation and the sunlight that attracted me to this subject. 

I’m also very much pleased with the edges.  While cropped in a bit from the other frames, the bottom right still has that shadow to keep the eye from wandering away from the image.  The twigs at the bottom are still in their place, and the bush on the left anchors the frame in a way that doesn’t detract from the image.  Working clockwise, I’m pleased with the tension between the branches and the left frame as well as the top of the tree and the top edge.  It’s that “ma” concept I discussed in the last post.  And there is still the branch pointing to the moon, given a bit more space than the other sky edges, letting the moon float in that field of blue.  

I think the square format, and subsequent enlargement on the monitor, from the reduction in width, better emphasizes the textures of the bushes, tree and branches and the interaction of the tree and the moon than the rectangle does.  The moon just looks bigger in this version.  

Maybe I “saw” the image in a square when I took it and just didn’t realize it.  Who knows, but I’m pleased with how this turned out.  It’s nothing spectacular, but it’s a solid image given what I had to work with.  And it was an opportunity to practice my craft both in photographing it and in developing it 5 years later.  That’s always a good thing.

Now, I should note that my tree is not nearly as incredible as Ann’s Canyonlands Tree.  If you want a treat, go to the website’s welcome page and let the images scroll by . . . you’ll know which one I’m talking about when you see it.  Scariest of all?  Behind that tree is a parking lot and off to the left, a welcome shelter.  Proof that you can find incredible images pretty much anywhere if you’re attentive.