“Scenes and Photographs" Some thoughts...
Posted: Tue Aug 24, 2010 10:37 am
“Scenes and Photographs: Some thoughts about finding extraordinary images in ordinary landscape scenes”
I traveled recently through the Woodstock area and looked at many of the remarkable places that photographers from all over the world have visited with their cameras and tripods over the years – all after that wonderful image of the extraordinary Vermont landscape. I was fortunately traveling with my wife Catherine Croner, whose father Ted Croner was one of America’s greatest photographers, and she one of the best photo editors living…and no one better to go exploring with for great photographic opportunities.
Driving back to NY I had many thoughts about the wonderful Vermont landscape, and about photography…and decided to write some of them down in the following. I am going to be describing briefly the idea of “finding photographs in scenes” – bringing my own experience, opinions, thoughts to the subject…knowing that these are of course subjective. Anyway, let’s go…
We made the journey up the amazing Cloudland Rd. for the first time and stopped at Sleepy Hollow Farm – which we had seen numbers of photographs of online and in other venues. Her first comment was that the barns were not interesting as subjects, so probably not the basis for great photographs. I thought for a minute….looking at them…and had to concur. There is a solo barn building off to the left with a hill running downward in front of it…that is a very interesting subject, that together …on a fall or winter snowy morning…could make an interesting shot. This is the shot I’m waiting to see on the pages of www.scenesofvermont.com
Thought. We as photographers must stop and look and think about what we are seeing – and not take for granted the thousands upon thousands of Google entries about what has been the “God-send” of a landscape image type (hopefully we all want to take great images, and not just image types). As an architect – I can do this fairly naturally with built structures…determining on the spot if it is worth photographing or not. How do we do it if we are not? How do we ascertain what in the image is in fact…image worthy? Following are some thoughts about how one might go about it. I am going to use a number of examples of my own photographs, only because they are “at hand” and in my memory. Some are from my site www.brandtbolding.com and others are from a Blurb book prototype called “Farmall” which can be seen at http://www.blurb.com/books/1473994 In case of book examples I will use page number.
Gesture: I have never learned any greater lesson in photography than this
Jay Maisel who has been my erstwhile mentor for many years has always asked his students to always find this “trinity” in their work – Light, Color, Gesture. A really great photograph Jay would say has all three – but sometimes they have maybe two, or rarely just one. Gesture is the most difficult to ascribe meaning too, but the one with the most potential payoff. To understand gesture is to understand the image worthy. Note that it is important not to get “hung up” on the dictionary meaning of the word, as each photographer is going to learn how to give it his or her own meaning…and there can be thousands upon thousands. I will give a few brief examples of my own examples of gesture and they range widely.
1. Extraordinary/Interesting Building – e.g. I love the little connecting barn at the Jenne farm that has had its sides cut out so cows could go through. Learn to discriminate: What is a great building and what is an ordinary (non-photo worthy) building? Do mental exercises when you are out – to see if you can come up with examples.
2. Combination of Moderately Interesting Building with an Interesting (or extraordinarily interesting) Background, Sky etc. Page 30
3. Amazing Sky – on my site www.brandtbolding.com in the Landscape gallery the second and the ninth, and fifteenth images – have great gesture in the clouds.
4. Softness – fresh deep new snow on the ground and the trees, the velvety soft tops of cornstalks as they are illuminated by the sun as in the cornfield shot in my Farm gallery.
5. Mystery- the silhouette of figures in the dawn fog as in the third shot in the Farm gallery.
6. Movement – the clouds rolling like a ball over the top of a barn at dawn, illuminated by the morning sun
7. Silence or Aloneness. Page 25 – Dutch barn
8. Illumination. Page 33
9. A Color. Page 41
10. A Time Of Year. Page 41
When you can tell yourself what the gesture(s) is in your photograph, and why it is worth photographing before you snap the shutter – you have made the leap light years ahead of where you may have been before.
When Telling Too Much, Is Too Much
We naturally see “wide shots” when we look at landscapes around us. Our eyes non-discriminatingly take in everything that is in front of us like a huge optical vacuum cleaner. As photographers who are striving for great images, we are not trying to collect everything…but to find that magical something (note that when you open up the canister from your vacuum cleaner – what’s in there is not usually so interesting and almost never… magical). In a recent workshop with the great photographer Art Wolfe, he spoke about the importance of “going into” the shot. He would typically find a great landscape opportunity, but more often than not, the great shot was not the extreme wide shot – but was found by his moving “into the image”. If you get a chance to see his public TV program “Travels To The Edge” – watch it – he’s really great.
Two examples of shots of Waits River I find instructive in this regard. In the first sticky in the Vermont Photo Forums there are two photographs. The first is a wide shot or w.s.. The first problem with this shot is the sky. It is bland negative space and because this is included in the w.s. – it makes the photo much less interesting. By cropping in on the right one can also eliminate the problem white church dead in the center of the image which takes away all the dynamism by having a hum-drum static center (the usual rule is placement on “thirds”, or I sometimes prefer a ratio of 4 to 3). Because this shot is so wide, and takes in everything, it collects all that is brownish and amber – and it all becomes an amorphous color blob – which detracts the viewer from reading the image contents. As well, most of the contents, i.e., buildings are uninteresting subjects, so why include them all? Remember great books don’t include all the words in the dictionary…
The second photograph is a tighter shot of the white church flanked by two amber barns. This photographer is definitely onto some thing…and the shot is moving toward becoming a really great photograph worthy of a book, or magazine entry. The compression of foreground to background (a long focal length used?) creates a wonderful dynamism in the curving road approaching the church. The church is at point of roughly 4 to 3 horiz. and vertically which creates beautiful tension. That there are only three buildings to look at – two barnlike, and one stylish painted church – is easier for the viewer to take in and truly appreciate these structures. And what a wonderful gesture! – the counterpoint and contrast between the humble utilitarian barn structures, and the formal white church. Magnificent. The fact there is a limited amount of red popping out of the green and harmonizing with the amber barns is very strong and vibrant. Some blue sky would have been nice, but there wasn’t any that day…c’est la vie.
Thought. Jay Maisel sometimes says if it is a perfect day go home. He means that a perfect, bland blue sky e.g. as in the first Waits River example can make a photo uninteresting – because it has no gesture. I have found that the wonderful skies full of gesture often appear to me after cataclysmic storms, and often when I least expect “good results”. On page 7 of Farmall is a photo of a somewhat interesting barn on a really beautiful morning full of mist, and moisture on the corn, and the color Rose Madder in the b.g.. There had been a big storm the night before no reason so expect too much the next day at least from the forecast I saw. I happened to be driving past it just before dawn on the way to a video shoot…and whipped the car over pulled out my cameras and snapped this image. I got two like this and the battery had to be changed…and the magic disappeared. Ha. It’s interesting to note that I drove here again the next morning specifically to shoot at dawn…and it was an absolutely perfect sky…and absolutely worthless for photography.
On page 16 are the Persistence Foundation barns. I had started in the afternoon with a very nice and interesting sky (see first image in my Landscape gallery of the Birch trees) – had many great images from that part of the day. Then the most ominous and amazing dark clouds started appearing toward sunset…and I thought “now I’m NOT going to get that beautiful sunset” – but stuck around and what I got was a million times better than what I could have “preconceived” (pre-conception in photography is extremely dangerous and should be avoided at all costs – I learned this from my father-in-law Ted Croner – and he knew). The sunlight was compressed under the cloud layer and blasted against the buildings still with the wild clouds overhead. There are many other shots from this time of the day – never could have planned it – thank God still I was there for the magic.
On the next page 17, is another example. I had been driving home from a photo shoot, and very very tired. It had been raining really hard all the way down the interstate…and then started to clear up as I neared the exit close to where the windmill is located. I thought well, why not, you may just have to sleep longer tomorrow morning. I started shooting the most extraordinary sunset colors – amazing photos from this time of day. Then, the sun started to go down and the mist started to rise, creating these horizontal bands of blue green across the hill, and blue mist above and around the now barely visible windmill. This was not the “picture perfect” sunset I was shooting moments ago, but this was infinitely better…and this probably one of the greatest moments I have ever had photographing the outdoors. I never stop thinking about this moment.
In closing, I hope everyone has a wonderful autumn in Vermont this year. My hope for all of us would be to look for what has never been seen before, go where it is quiet and there are not “40 other tripods” and consider the gesture and what is truly singular and extraordinary within a landscape scene – find that magic…then... let the shutter click.
I traveled recently through the Woodstock area and looked at many of the remarkable places that photographers from all over the world have visited with their cameras and tripods over the years – all after that wonderful image of the extraordinary Vermont landscape. I was fortunately traveling with my wife Catherine Croner, whose father Ted Croner was one of America’s greatest photographers, and she one of the best photo editors living…and no one better to go exploring with for great photographic opportunities.
Driving back to NY I had many thoughts about the wonderful Vermont landscape, and about photography…and decided to write some of them down in the following. I am going to be describing briefly the idea of “finding photographs in scenes” – bringing my own experience, opinions, thoughts to the subject…knowing that these are of course subjective. Anyway, let’s go…
We made the journey up the amazing Cloudland Rd. for the first time and stopped at Sleepy Hollow Farm – which we had seen numbers of photographs of online and in other venues. Her first comment was that the barns were not interesting as subjects, so probably not the basis for great photographs. I thought for a minute….looking at them…and had to concur. There is a solo barn building off to the left with a hill running downward in front of it…that is a very interesting subject, that together …on a fall or winter snowy morning…could make an interesting shot. This is the shot I’m waiting to see on the pages of www.scenesofvermont.com
Thought. We as photographers must stop and look and think about what we are seeing – and not take for granted the thousands upon thousands of Google entries about what has been the “God-send” of a landscape image type (hopefully we all want to take great images, and not just image types). As an architect – I can do this fairly naturally with built structures…determining on the spot if it is worth photographing or not. How do we do it if we are not? How do we ascertain what in the image is in fact…image worthy? Following are some thoughts about how one might go about it. I am going to use a number of examples of my own photographs, only because they are “at hand” and in my memory. Some are from my site www.brandtbolding.com and others are from a Blurb book prototype called “Farmall” which can be seen at http://www.blurb.com/books/1473994 In case of book examples I will use page number.
Gesture: I have never learned any greater lesson in photography than this
Jay Maisel who has been my erstwhile mentor for many years has always asked his students to always find this “trinity” in their work – Light, Color, Gesture. A really great photograph Jay would say has all three – but sometimes they have maybe two, or rarely just one. Gesture is the most difficult to ascribe meaning too, but the one with the most potential payoff. To understand gesture is to understand the image worthy. Note that it is important not to get “hung up” on the dictionary meaning of the word, as each photographer is going to learn how to give it his or her own meaning…and there can be thousands upon thousands. I will give a few brief examples of my own examples of gesture and they range widely.
1. Extraordinary/Interesting Building – e.g. I love the little connecting barn at the Jenne farm that has had its sides cut out so cows could go through. Learn to discriminate: What is a great building and what is an ordinary (non-photo worthy) building? Do mental exercises when you are out – to see if you can come up with examples.
2. Combination of Moderately Interesting Building with an Interesting (or extraordinarily interesting) Background, Sky etc. Page 30
3. Amazing Sky – on my site www.brandtbolding.com in the Landscape gallery the second and the ninth, and fifteenth images – have great gesture in the clouds.
4. Softness – fresh deep new snow on the ground and the trees, the velvety soft tops of cornstalks as they are illuminated by the sun as in the cornfield shot in my Farm gallery.
5. Mystery- the silhouette of figures in the dawn fog as in the third shot in the Farm gallery.
6. Movement – the clouds rolling like a ball over the top of a barn at dawn, illuminated by the morning sun
7. Silence or Aloneness. Page 25 – Dutch barn
8. Illumination. Page 33
9. A Color. Page 41
10. A Time Of Year. Page 41
When you can tell yourself what the gesture(s) is in your photograph, and why it is worth photographing before you snap the shutter – you have made the leap light years ahead of where you may have been before.
When Telling Too Much, Is Too Much
We naturally see “wide shots” when we look at landscapes around us. Our eyes non-discriminatingly take in everything that is in front of us like a huge optical vacuum cleaner. As photographers who are striving for great images, we are not trying to collect everything…but to find that magical something (note that when you open up the canister from your vacuum cleaner – what’s in there is not usually so interesting and almost never… magical). In a recent workshop with the great photographer Art Wolfe, he spoke about the importance of “going into” the shot. He would typically find a great landscape opportunity, but more often than not, the great shot was not the extreme wide shot – but was found by his moving “into the image”. If you get a chance to see his public TV program “Travels To The Edge” – watch it – he’s really great.
Two examples of shots of Waits River I find instructive in this regard. In the first sticky in the Vermont Photo Forums there are two photographs. The first is a wide shot or w.s.. The first problem with this shot is the sky. It is bland negative space and because this is included in the w.s. – it makes the photo much less interesting. By cropping in on the right one can also eliminate the problem white church dead in the center of the image which takes away all the dynamism by having a hum-drum static center (the usual rule is placement on “thirds”, or I sometimes prefer a ratio of 4 to 3). Because this shot is so wide, and takes in everything, it collects all that is brownish and amber – and it all becomes an amorphous color blob – which detracts the viewer from reading the image contents. As well, most of the contents, i.e., buildings are uninteresting subjects, so why include them all? Remember great books don’t include all the words in the dictionary…
The second photograph is a tighter shot of the white church flanked by two amber barns. This photographer is definitely onto some thing…and the shot is moving toward becoming a really great photograph worthy of a book, or magazine entry. The compression of foreground to background (a long focal length used?) creates a wonderful dynamism in the curving road approaching the church. The church is at point of roughly 4 to 3 horiz. and vertically which creates beautiful tension. That there are only three buildings to look at – two barnlike, and one stylish painted church – is easier for the viewer to take in and truly appreciate these structures. And what a wonderful gesture! – the counterpoint and contrast between the humble utilitarian barn structures, and the formal white church. Magnificent. The fact there is a limited amount of red popping out of the green and harmonizing with the amber barns is very strong and vibrant. Some blue sky would have been nice, but there wasn’t any that day…c’est la vie.
Thought. Jay Maisel sometimes says if it is a perfect day go home. He means that a perfect, bland blue sky e.g. as in the first Waits River example can make a photo uninteresting – because it has no gesture. I have found that the wonderful skies full of gesture often appear to me after cataclysmic storms, and often when I least expect “good results”. On page 7 of Farmall is a photo of a somewhat interesting barn on a really beautiful morning full of mist, and moisture on the corn, and the color Rose Madder in the b.g.. There had been a big storm the night before no reason so expect too much the next day at least from the forecast I saw. I happened to be driving past it just before dawn on the way to a video shoot…and whipped the car over pulled out my cameras and snapped this image. I got two like this and the battery had to be changed…and the magic disappeared. Ha. It’s interesting to note that I drove here again the next morning specifically to shoot at dawn…and it was an absolutely perfect sky…and absolutely worthless for photography.
On page 16 are the Persistence Foundation barns. I had started in the afternoon with a very nice and interesting sky (see first image in my Landscape gallery of the Birch trees) – had many great images from that part of the day. Then the most ominous and amazing dark clouds started appearing toward sunset…and I thought “now I’m NOT going to get that beautiful sunset” – but stuck around and what I got was a million times better than what I could have “preconceived” (pre-conception in photography is extremely dangerous and should be avoided at all costs – I learned this from my father-in-law Ted Croner – and he knew). The sunlight was compressed under the cloud layer and blasted against the buildings still with the wild clouds overhead. There are many other shots from this time of the day – never could have planned it – thank God still I was there for the magic.
On the next page 17, is another example. I had been driving home from a photo shoot, and very very tired. It had been raining really hard all the way down the interstate…and then started to clear up as I neared the exit close to where the windmill is located. I thought well, why not, you may just have to sleep longer tomorrow morning. I started shooting the most extraordinary sunset colors – amazing photos from this time of day. Then, the sun started to go down and the mist started to rise, creating these horizontal bands of blue green across the hill, and blue mist above and around the now barely visible windmill. This was not the “picture perfect” sunset I was shooting moments ago, but this was infinitely better…and this probably one of the greatest moments I have ever had photographing the outdoors. I never stop thinking about this moment.
In closing, I hope everyone has a wonderful autumn in Vermont this year. My hope for all of us would be to look for what has never been seen before, go where it is quiet and there are not “40 other tripods” and consider the gesture and what is truly singular and extraordinary within a landscape scene – find that magic…then... let the shutter click.
) for me. I have written on my own blog about my own "mentors" telling me to "move in tighter," "get closer," with their critique of many of my images. I got from Brandt's comments the thought of trying to "put the viewer into the scene," rather than showing the viewer the scene from a distance. His comments on Carol's shots seem in line with my idea of a good photograph (although my own posted Waits River image is more the wider scene -- and on retrospect, the church steeple does suffer from the "static" centering, something I have often referred to as "bullseye" composition in my own critiquing). I do like the more intimate scene.