Good Photo - Great Photo
“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” Ansel Adams
“A great photograph is knowing which lens to put on your camera.” Dan Terrell
I’ve done previous posts about how Ann and I can be standing mere feet apart (in one instance in Lamar Valley, it was inches apart, with our tripod legs intertwined) yet come out with radically different images. This is not one of those posts. Rather, this is about how Ann and I can be pretty much taking the same image, yet not quite. And one works while the other doesn’t.
Ansel is right of course, because he’s Ansel. But really, making strong images is about decision making and yes, probably the most significant decision one can make is where to stand (or where to place your tripod). However, to make a great photograph, there are a zillion other decisions you have to make, and get right. One of the things I think that truly sets photography apart from the other arts (perhaps not film making, but certainly for painting in most instances) is the frame. In photography, it is necessarily much more intentional, even more than in painting. And that’s the significance between Ann’s image and mine.
Once you’ve figured out where to stand, you then have to figure out how you’re going to frame your image. And the most critical component for that comes in the focal length of the lens. Do you want a wide-angle lens to get the vastness of the space; or a telephoto lens to focus on a detail? The choices matter. In this case, Ann got it right. I got it wrong, wrong and wrong (yes, wrong, three times nonetheless).
On the second morning at the Painted Hills, Ann and I were about 50 feet apart (maybe 100), on the main ridge looking towards the west. As you’ll see, we both pretty much saw the same scene and the potential it had to offer (read: a lot). I suspect we were working towards creating similar images. (Sometimes great minds do think alike.)
My initial reaction was to try to capture the expanse of the view, a grand landscape, with the desert flowers in the foreground, the rolling hills in the mid-ground and the early sunlit hills off in the distance. So I selected a 16mm wide angle lens to bring it all into a single frame. It helped that the clouds were shapely and worked to frame the image.
The problem with wide angle lenses is that sometimes smaller elements get lost in the expansive image. Certainly anything beyond the immediate foreground appears smaller and less pronounced than normal. That is the reason I tend to not “go wide,” I’m often interested in what is happening in the background as well as the foreground. In this case, well, I’ve always enjoyed that tree in the bend by the hill in the middle right (as you’ll see), and it was simply lost in this framing. I was sure I could do better.
So I switched to a 33mm lens, pretty much a normal field of view. I was finally able to make something of the tree, and to keep the white, chalk-like feature within the frame (which I’d photographed frequently that weekend). I lost a bit of the hills to the left and certainly the flowers in the foreground and the upper, framing clouds. But there were other clouds to work with (if I used the 9:16 crop that I’d experimented with on the Terrell Brothers Roadtrip) and, importantly, more detail to be had with this focal length. And note, the sunlit hills in the distance are now more pronounced.
Still, something seemed lacking in the image; it failed to have a coherency with the image to give it structure or balance, that indescribable visual sense that makes great landscape images just “feel right.”
So I did what I often do, which is to focus even further on one element of the landscape that grabs my attention, which in this case was the tree.
This framing of the image is also off, though the reality is that I adjusted the crop in my camera so that it rendered as a square (as shown on the main blog page). That seems a reasonable composition for a square image. If I had composed (framed) the above image as a 3:4 or 2:3 from the start, I suspect I would have moved the frame so that the tree was a bit to the right in the frame and more of the gentle up-hill slope was shown. I suspect that wouldn’t have mattered much in the long run - the image is just too tightly framed to be presented as a landscape instead of a composed image of a tree in its environment. In the end, this image, like the other images, fails to capture the sense of landscape that I was seeing and that I’d been working on capturing in my images during the vacation trips.
The above images are ok, and of a decent standard. Certainly I don’t think they’re something to hang my head down about (Ann would say, “Fling myself off of a bridge”), but they fall short of what I was hoping for and certainly of what was given to us that morning.
My images, of course, have to be compared with Ann’s, which if you’ve read our recent printing the image post you’ll know I think is simply superb. Put another way, hers is great, not just good.
In the last post, I discussed other compositional and development decisions Ann made (getting to this final version) that make it such a great image. Here, instead, I’ll discuss my expansion to Ansel’s quote - it matters what focal length lens you put on the camera once you find the right spot. Simply put, Ann photographed her image with a 23mm lens - Ann put the right lens on her camera. Call it the Goldilocks field of view for this image. My 16mm lens was too wide. My 33mm lens had too narrow a field of view (and the 56mm . . . that bed isn’t even in the house). Ann, however, started with the Goldilocks lens, and proceeded from there.
Ann’s much nicer image.
I guess one could argue that the distance between us mattered in making the image, but I don’t think so. Really, the only thing that is significantly different at this scale of landscape photography between our two positions was the juxtaposition of the tree in front in relation to the hill immediately behind it, and I don’t see that as significantly altering the impression of this landscape. The basic landscape forms, textures and colors and lighting do not fundamentally change between Ann’s images and mine, which means our separate locations don’t matter.
The fact is, decision making builds upon itself. Make an incorrect decision early on (such as which lens do I pull out of the bag - and in case you’re wondering, yes, I had a 23mm lens with me) and it becomes very difficult to craft an excellent image. It might be good, but not great. And as discussed in the previous post, as Ann worked on the image, she altered the framing a bit to include more foreground than sky, which made a significant improvement towards the final image.
Ann, it seems, picked the right lens for this image. And if you’re wondering whether that decision was intentional, yes it was. Unlike me, Ann photographed from this location using that single lens. It was simply the right lens to use, why change focal lengths?