Hey Simon Booth, you don't need to start worrying about the competition.
Len, please correct me if I’m misremembering this story, but I don’t think so. Way back in Len’s tennis playing youth, he went to a tennis clinic and, of all things, got to hit some balls with Stan Smith. For those of you old enough to remember, yes, Wimbledon Championship winner Stan Smith. For those of you too young to remember, well, think of the all-white (with just a touch of green trim) Adidas Stan Smith tennis shoe, still popular to this day - that Stan Smith. I remember asking Len about how it went. He said they were hitting it back and forth, with the pace picking up and, like any precocious young tennis player would do, “Then I decided to hit it as hard as I could to see if I could get it past him.” Long story short, no. Len suddenly saw a blur on the far side of the court, and then another blur, accompanied by the simultaneous whizzing of a very fast tennis ball as it passed by him before he could even move. Heck, you can’t blame him for trying. I’m sure I would have tried the same thing . . . in fact I did when I got my own chance at going against the pros. But that’s a story for another time.
What does that have to do with photography you might ask? Well, everything! People who are experts (or in Len’s case, champion) in what they do are, in fact, experts and do things way better than we do. We think we can do what they can, but most of the time we’re just fooling ourselves.
One of our favorite photographers to watch on YouTube is Simon Booth. He is an English woodlands photographer who is quite unlike the typical hyperactive YouTube personality. Simon is calm, thoughtful, insightful and, most of all, an amazing photographer. One of the things he does so well, time and time and time again, is to photograph the woodland floor. That accumulation of material that most of us walk over without paying much, if any, attention to, our eyes glued to the trees and life at waist height and above. Almost every one of Simon’s videos has at least one image that reminds you to look down at the ground every so often - there’s a lot to see (and photograph).
So a few weekends ago, given we had a break in our wet weather of late, I decided to take advantage of our very leafy yard. Not quite woodland, but close enough for a bit of pleasure photography. Yes, it was fun, yes it was interesting, but man is it hard work and no, I am no Simon Booth. Really, how does he do it?
For starters, I want to say hats-off to today’s cameras. I remember when I finally made an image with a digital camera and thought, “Digital has finally caught up with film.” That image is the Painted Hills image that is the header on the website’s main page. That’s when I stopped shooting film. Back then, I was thinking 35 mm film, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before the quality you could get with digital would match medium format and then large format film. That Painted Hills image was made with a 12 megapixel sensor and easily matched anything I’d made with 35mm film. Now, we’re photographing with a camera that has a 40 megapixel sensor and the low light performance is even better than before, able to make lovely images in light conditions film cannot touch. Not to mention the detail. I go down this path because, despite my disappointment with most of the images (really 3-Star images if that), the technology readily opens up a world for visual exploration. Especially on a large monitor. Enlarge the image and you realize there is an incredible world in each image, generally not noticed by the naked eye. For example, that delicate, small, light colored oak leaf on the bottom center of the image above belies the age and deterioration of the much larger leaves around it. And is so easy to miss if you’re not attentive.
Each of these images have little details you can get lost in. Beautiful contrasts between stems and leaves; edges frayed by time and nature; colors unimaginable until you really look at them, realizing they are not a single color, but a mix of a wide variety of colors and hues. In some ways, these images are easy because the technology makes them so easy to make, the quality begs exploration and the subjects have so much to offer the viewer. But it’s like going to a place like Yosemite, it’s almost as if anywhere you point the camera you come away with an image others will compliment. But just because others might be impressed with your results doesn’t mean they’re necessarily good photographs. Even less successful images (some perhaps even “failures”) can still bring pleasure to a curious eye and mind, a person familiar with a place, or a family member. That’s the wonder of photography, and perhaps the reason it is dismissed by so many other visual arts. But, again, that alone does not make it a good photograph.
As with all things photography, creating a good image is a combination of both vision and technical skill. Taking the easier one first - technical skill - as amazing as cameras are today, they do not readily overcome all obstacles out there (though I guess at some point AI can and will take over to make it all simple, creating images out of mere word descriptions with no concern about how the image is lit or the fact that the subject matter is a confusing jumble of leaves, all from the comfort of your office chair - that’s not something I’m interested in to be honest. Give me a tromp through the woods any day.).
Let’s speak of one technical issue - glare. Call it experience, or just common opportunity, but Simon Booth rarely photographs wet leaves on the woodland floor. It’s easy to see why. Most, but not all, of his subjects are fairly dry. Wet leaves have a sheen to them and odd splashes of glare from reflecting the sky. As any experienced photographer will tell you, that’s when it’s time to pull out the polarizer filter to try and remove some of that glare. I say some, because polarizers reduce the reflection from light at only certain angles and only from one primary direction at a time. As you rotate the filter, the effects change in both degree and location. So, as you can see in these images, there is inevitably some part of a curved leaf that still has a bit of sheen on it. Rotate the filter and the sheen will be eliminated on one side of the leaf but not another; rotate the filter further, it switches sides, or appears somewhere else in the image. Ultimately, you keep rotating the filter until you reach the best compromise. “What’s the best?” you ask? Whatever it is you think it is in the moment. There is no fixed rule (nor can there be with complex subjects). It becomes a matter of experience and judgment. Like so many situations involving the technology of photography, it becomes a question of making the right decision in the moment. If you’re successful, it works. If not . . . well, the image doesn’t.
In our age of digital cameras, it’s so much easier to look at the image on the back of the camera immediately after making it and, at least with the worst decision-making, potentially find out you got it wrong and should try something else. Back in the old days, you would have to wait until the film got processed to discover that, “Wow, I really screwed up with the polarizer on all 36 images. What a waste of film!” Yes, we have it easy today. Sure, sometimes you get back to the office to look at an image large on the monitor and think, “If only I’d noticed that . . . (glare, stick coming in from the side of the frame, person with their eye closed . . . you name it)!” But it happens a lot less frequently than it used to (but more often than we’d like to admit).
So I spent about an hour photographing leaves, trying to carefully see and compose interesting images. That lasted until the sun started coming out - giving a nice glow (above) initially, but then turning into harsh sunlight. By that point, I was mentally and physically exhausted. Such precise work is mentally taxing, and working the tripod to photograph downward is equally physically demanding. Ok, as I get older, simply bending over is physically demanding. So I called it a day . . . and tried again a week later in another part of the yard.
Which brings us to the vision issue. How to make sense of the chaos. Like I said, you can photograph a chaotic spread of leaves and open up a world for exploration like the image below. But that alone rarely makes for a good photograph. Where is the composition in it? Is there any sense of hidden order in the chaos? What attracts the eye? Is there anything that readily surprises you or jumps out at you? Does it feel . . . settled, right, . . . or as Charlie Waite may say, “Just so?”
If not, well the image may still be nice, but that’s just about all it is.
What makes it a good photograph to look at? That’s what Simon Booth does so well, making images that are balanced and filled with opportunities to explore. And that was something I was simply struggling with both weekends. None of the images really seem to work as well as I’d hoped. I’d think I see something, but once I framed it, it fell short. I’d do my best to create something that looked good on the screen, but when I’d bring it up on the monitor . . . not quite.
Granted, like all new subjects, one should not expect to suddenly be a master. Not even if you’ve been photographing for decades. New subjects are new subjects. First efforts are first efforts (even if they’re not really my “first” efforts). So one makes the images as best one can, study them, learn from them, and try again. Keep at it because the images will get better and better over time (though there are no guarantees). Hopefully, it won’t take 10,000 images for that to start happening. But it will take work, and hopefully enjoyable work that (not so) slowly becomes less and less frustrating.
And in the meantime, I’ll just have to keep reminding myself, I’m no Simon Booth.