I don’t think there has ever been a time in my
existence when I wasn’t fascinated by the small
details of life. My mother has told me stories of how
ridiculously long it took to walk anywhere with me when I
was a toddler as I kept stopping every few feet or so to
inspect something that had caught my interest. For anyone
who’s ever had the experience of walking somewhere
with me today, they can probably attest that not a lot has
changed! *GRIN*
Though it can be distracting (and occasionally
overwhelming), my heightened attention to very small
details is not a trait I would ever really want to change.
I think it is an essential component of being a good
naturalist… and photographer too. Being able to see
small differences in two different shots can be very
useful when editing a large number of images. Paying
attention to how an image makes you feel if you alter the
exposure a little or experiment with a slightly different
crop can really improve your finished product. Of course,
sometimes I wonder if the things I get hung-up on are
perhaps too subtle for most people to care about.
For instance, I was working on this image today:
This gorgeous scene was captured from the window of the
train on the return leg of our
trip to Seattle. The body of water paralleling the tracks provided a
perfect mirror image of the striated sky above. The colors
were subtle and perfect. This is the image I took,
full-frame, nothing done in post-processing except to
adjust the exposure a bit. I wanted this to feel somewhat
abstract. I wanted it to be more about the repeating
colors and lines than about the context of the scenery per
se. As I stared at the above image, something just
wasn’t sitting right for me. So, I cropped it, like
this:
If you can immediately tell the difference between these
two shots… well then, I am impressed! This crop did
serve some practical purpose because my camera creates
images that are roughly 8 x 10.6 inches. These dimensions
are not particularly useful for making prints and cropping
this to a standard size of 8 x 10 inches makes sense. But,
that’s not why I did it. My reasons were far less
obvious…
I am always trying to understand how someone’s eye
reads a photo or piece of artwork. I think there are ways
to guide the eye. To subtly suggest where the focus should
be and how the eye travels to get there. My goal with this
piece was to have the viewer’s eye follow the
repeating horizontal lines in a way that would feel
seamless… flowing, I suppose. Back and forth, like a
typewriter, spewing pastel lines of clouds and water. I
wanted to include the land below the water because it
anchored the whole scene a bit and gave a hint of context.
But foreground — especially darker foreground — is always
going to draw the eye, and in this case, my attention kept
being inexorably drawn to that tiny dark blob in the lower
left corner. A little bump that made me stop and
scrutinize when I wanted to just keep gliding back and
forth.
At this point — if you’re still reading —
you’re probably thinking 1) this woman is more than
a little neurotic, and 2) does it really make any
appreciable difference? Well, I freely admit to the first
point… and as to the second, who knows? I felt
instantly better about the whole thing after cropping it,
but I have no idea how it translates to others. I’d
be happy to hear what you think! Here are the two images
side-by-side:
*Click on this (and the above images) if you want to
see a larger view.*
Eventually, after staring at these two images for long
enough and putting this blog post together, I began to
second-guess myself.
What was the big deal with the little blob anyway??? It finally dawned on me that it was the
“blob” part that wasn’t working for me.
Though a small protrusion, it poked up out of an otherwise
congruous series of lines and drew attention. But then, to
further frustrate things, I simply couldn’t resolve
what I was looking at and that made my eye linger
even longer on this spot. At this point, curiosity got the
better of me and I enlarged the image and seriously
increased the exposure to get a better view of the
inscrutable dark lump.
Surprise! It’s a GOOSE!!! A Canada Goose, with its
back to the camera, to be exact. Hah! Now,
if this goose had been more visible, recognizable
as a goose from a distance, there is no way that I ever
would’ve considered cropping it out. That would have
been a perfect destination for the viewer’s eye —
traveling across the image and settling on this lone bird
also surveying the unfolding scenery. Ahhh, but it
wasn’t meant to be this time around, I guess.
Hmmm… re-reading this post, it seems awfully long
and meandering. Not sure if anything I’ve written
will be of interest to anyone. Just trying to give some
insight into my creative process, which at times can
perhaps be overly rigorous. More and more, I recognize
that I must give myself more freedom to have fun and be
spontaneous with my photography… but,
the details do matter to me and
they probably always will. And… I’m OK with
that!
