composition
It's all about location, location, location!
Ansel Adams said it a long time ago: "A good photograph is knowing where to stand". Of course, there are many other things to making a good photograph, but where to place our camera is arguable one of the most important ones.
In this video, I talk about this as I share a very good example of this.
A field. One tree. The most simple scene. And yet, so many options. So many ways to make an image. Let's talk about them.
A beautiful scene is not enough to make a good image. Photography is not about capturing, it’s about creating our own fantasies and illusions to express what we feel. For that, we need to stop seeing reality as it is, and start seeing “in images”.
I try not to think too much about composition when I shoot: I point the camera at whatever I saw, I move around, and press the button whenever it feels right.
It's when I'm back at home that I can see more clearly if the image works or not. Although rare, there are cases where I'll find an image I had not seen in the field, an image I can still make by "re-composing" the original negative or file.
Most of my images are square, as you know. If I'm shooting digital, that means I have to crop the files to that format. While I'd rather shoot square natively, having that extra room for editing has proven to be very useful.
One example is this image of a couple of swans I took in Lago di Garda, in Northern Italy, a few months ago. It was only when I looked at it on the computer that I saw how it could work with a heavy cropping.
Original 3:2 raw file showing the crop.
Final square image.
Another example is this image of the Badlands National Park, in South Dakota. I'd taken the original photo almost 2 years ago, but it wasn't until recently that I "saw" the panoramic image in it. It was not my intention when I took it, I wasn't thinking about a panorama, but it works.
These are extreme examples, though. Most of the time, all I do is small adjustments to the composition I did manage to capture in the field. For example, take a look at this image of a tree in the italian Alps, and compare it to the original square crop. I decided to place the tree a little bit further to the left, giving the branch a bit more room to grow to the right of the frame.
Original square crop.
Adjusted square crop.
There's no shame in creating a completely new image after the shot. As I said many times, photography is not a competition, there is no prize for those who get it right the first time. Legends of photography like Ansel Adams kept playing with old negatives for decades, coming up with new edits and interpretations.
Photography is a creative process, inspiration can hit you at any point in your workflow. Embrace it.
Self-play is a concept that I find fascinating: artificial intelligence can learn how to play games -like chess- by playing against themselves over and over. Starting from scratch, with no knowledge of what works and what doesn't, machines eventually come up with strategies and plays that surprise even grandmasters, who reward them as "creative". This made me think about photography: how we look for inspiration in other photographers' work, and the value of experimentation.
Read MoreYou may nail the composition, you and / or your camera might expose the shot perfectly, even the conditions could be ideal. And yet, the final image can be a bad one.
An imperfect composition, a rather dark or bright image, and less than ideal conditions could be ingredients for a great image.
We don’t know. Because photography isn’t a formula we can follow. Fortunately.
Photography is about uncertainty, about unpredictability, almost randomness. Perhaps this is what makes it so enjoyable.
Great images are rare - forget about formulas and be ready for when they come.
In formal photography, we worry about things like correct exposure and proper composition. Boring stuff that leads to images similar to what everyone else creates.
Photography is an art. Instead of capturing what your eye sees, capture what you see. Forget about technical details and silly composition rules, follow your gut and click away.
Point your camera at something and capture what's behind it.
We were in Yosemite. It was Christmas Eve and a big snowstorm had just passed by, leaving a beautiful white layer all over the park.
There weren’t many people around, but when we arrived at the Tunnel View viewpoint to photograph sunrise, we found a couple dozen photographers and their tripods anxiously waiting for the moment.
The landscape was beautiful. The valley was still sleepy as the light started to hit El Capitan. Everyone was focused on the scene, including me. Everyone but Rachel.
After taking a few shots, I saw her backing up. I thought she was going back to the car, it was freezing after all. But I noticed she kept shooting, in the same direction, and I couldn't figure out what in hell she was capturing.
I walked towards her and turned around. Then I saw it. I remember wondering: "How didn't I see it before?"
As beautiful as the landscape was, this scene was something else: all those photographers lining up at the viewpoint, all making the same images over and over.
I wasn't able to make a great image of them, this snapshot is all that remains. But I still remember the feeling of seeing something that was there, in front of you, that I couldn't manage to see before.
It was an eye-opening moment, a lesson I will never forget. I consider this to be the day when I learned how to see.
Keep your eyes open, always.
This is a common misconception.
Minimalism isn't about having a lot of negative space in our images.
Minimalism is about what we include and, most importantly, about what we don't. It's about removing everything until we are left with just what the image requires to tell the story.
A few days ago, I realized that my last images on Instagram were very similar to each other. Compositionally, I mean.
The subject was different, the location was different, the time of the day they were taken was different.
The composition technique was the same, though: a line going through the frame -in this case from top left to bottom right- splitting it in two, one part being empty (and dark) space and the other showing the actual subject.
Those subjects are as different as the Golden Gate bridge, Mt Hood, a lighthouse, a vulture and a deer. For some reason I decided to frame them all the same way. And they all are very recent images of mine.
Was it just coincidence? Maybe a "compositional phase"? Is that even a thing?
I made this image during a walk yesterday evening. I had passed by this field dozens of times before, but something caught my eye this time.
This image isn't supposed to work: there's no clear subject, no anchor, no leading lines. And still, there's something about it that I love.
It might be the emptiness of the field, or maybe the blackness of the pine trees. Perhaps the two bright cottonwoods on the very left edge of the frame.
Whatever it is, I think this image has many of the elements I seek with my photography. Many times, that means following your instinct and forgetting about everyone else's rules.
When we see something that catches our eye, it's very tempting to focus on that and start shooting from where we’re standing. This is a mistake.
A good subject is not enough to make a good image.
It's very important to stop and give the scene some time, see beyond the obvious and pay close attention to the background and the edges of our frame. They can make or break an image.
Even the most beautiful subject will make for a bad image with the wrong background.
Read More“Rather than shooting in colour because a subject calls for it, people tend to do so because that’s how their camera is set up. And all too often people compose their shot using the language of colour and then hope that it will translate into black and white later. Neither of these approaches work.”
Many people use monochrome to "fix" a bad photo. Others seem to have doubts about which version they prefer, so they post both: color and black and white.
While you can get good results every once in a while, this approach is wrong.
The tools you have available in black and white photography are very different from the ones you can use when shooting in color. The image should be in your mind first, then -and only then- we can choose whatever tools we need to create it.
