Always Take a Look Around . . . After You've Made the Image
I’ve written before about the fact that I’ll often, after making an image, turn around 180 degrees to look at what is behind me. It’s surprising how often there is another image just waiting to be made. This tip is somewhat of a variation on that one. After you’ve made the image that caught your eye in the first place, take a careful look around a bit before you move on.
Sometimes you make an image because a particular object catches your eye and you build an image around that object. But more often than that is the fact that a particular place grabs your attention more generally. Something in your gut (and eyes) says to photograph HERE. Sometimes the light conditions are adding something special, other times it’s just the nature of the place - interesting rock formations , a nice creek that just has to have an image in it somewhere, really, it can be anything. Well, you won’t often get the best, or the only, image from a location from your first composition. Certainly, make the image that caught your attention, but then it’s time to look around, explore a bit, because there is often more. You just have to find it.
Take the image below from our Kellerwald-Edersee trip. We’d gone off the trail up to the top of the spur the trail looped around and I came across this spot. It was an opening that invited you into the woods. It took me a bit to find a composition that worked. There was no real “subject” other than that sense of being invited into the woods, so it took me a while to determine precisely where I wanted the camera to be positioned. Then I had to experiment a bit with which focal length lens to use, which meant I swapped lenses a couple of times (going too wide, then too narrow and then deciding that the lens I had on the camera to start with was the right one - but you don’t know until you’ve explored the other options).
The image captures what I was hoping and, given the conditions, that was all one could really expect.
Still, there was something nice about these woods so I decided to explore a bit more, because trees change relationships as you move around and sometimes they’re very good at hiding interesting things. So I walked out into the scene you see above. I slowly walked well past that rock you can see on the ground in the center of the image above, carefully looking around uphill and downhill and into the distance, but not really seeing anything more.
That was until I turned around to tromp back to my tripod. Now, the image below shows you the green tree above that lies just to the right of center. And it shows you the tree from the same direction as the photograph taken above and as I looked at it while I walked by. It’s a nice, colorful tree, but really just a tree. I even thought about photographing the stray bits of bark on it . . . but decided there was nothing compelling about it.
However, in the image above, you can see where my tripod is, set to where the image below was made. You see, that part of the tree had a long crack in it that ran nearly the length of the tree (well, as far as I could really see). It was an interesting display of textures and forms, riddled with woodpecker holes made while searching for the bugs that inevitably seek out weak points in trees, like this subject. Unfortunately for me, the most interesting part was about 15 feet above the ground, I wasn’t going to be able to photograph that. But there was an interesting spot about chest height that was also compelling. So I composed an image.
The only reason I found this image was by walking into the scene I’d just photographed and looking around. You can’t see what you can’t see, and nature has a way of hiding things from us.
So even after you’ve made the image you wanted to make. Take some time, explore, wander, really look. You just might find something else that’s interesting and possibly even a photograph.