When I go out to take pictures I am hoping to create an image*, there’s something that I see that I want to portray through the camera. A lot of what that is comes from just looking at a scene before I ever bring the camera up to eye level or stoop down to tripod level, but it used to be that what I saw is rarely what I got, although I am getting better at visualizing the more I shoot.
The eye and the brain are selective, they automatically crop out what you don’t think is important or shouldn’t be in the picture and concentrates on what draws your eye in. The camera doesn’t have this automatic filter and often when you download the images or get that roll of film back from the lab those beautiful pictures you thought you took aren’t quite what you imagined. There’s that branch that is sticking out of the back of the sheep, or the big shadow on that wall, the leaf in front of the birds beak, there is too much sky, or too little, etc. There was an article recently in Earthbound Light Photography Tips talking about “a use for old slide mounts” and how using an old slide mount can refine your vision. It’s a great aid but nothing works better than actually getting out there.
No matter what, whether you use slide, negative or digital, no matter how good your vision is sometimes you need to crop, and a little cropping can make the world of difference in taking an image that you think has potential and turning it into Yeah, it was like that in my mind. I’ve had a few of those from our trip to Utah but none so illustrative as this one taken from a bit off the Grand View Overlook trail at sunset. Looking back towards Green River Overlook the setting sun illuminated the cliffs and even though there weren’t any clouds to make the sky very interesting there was some good color above the Mesa. I set up a few times to try and translate what I was seeing without the camera into what I was seeing through the camera, I finally took what I thought I saw but when I got home and opened the raw file this is what I had:
Not really what I saw but not too bad. So with a little cropping at a time and then some levels, curves and a bit of color correction this is what I came up with:
Removing much of the sky which to me was dead space really makes the difference. It took a ho-hum kind of picture to a much prettier image.
*Mike had an interesting conversation with a woman we met up at double arch who did not like using the words “take” an image or “take” a picture. To her it meant that you were removing something and taking it away, she also didn’t like the word “capture” for the same reason. The woman was or is an art student who started school studying photography but then moved to scuplture.
