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Optimizing Your Angle

Here’s another photo critique request my mom sent me. This one is a prime example for a post on optimizing your angle.

I love this mossy bridge in a private Japanese garden. The composition looking down the path set with stepping stones is inviting, and the deep green is refreshing and nourishing. The big tree in the foreground is a beautiful accent that serves to frame the scene.

My photo critique? This is essentially two pictures. One of a mossy bridge leading to an inviting path set with stones in a Japanese garden and another of a large pond with tufts of tall grass and large trees around it. I’m not really sure which to look at, and the pond being in the center of the photo and taking up two thirds of the frame, I feel a bit like if I ventured into the photo I’d walk straight into the water and fall in.

Here’s where optimizing your angle could made all the difference. Imagine how the mossy bridge would look if you were to take just one or two steps to the left and turn your camera to take a portrait style shot instead of a horizontal landscape. Then try taking in just a few more inches of the creek to the right of the bridge to put the path squarely on the one third line as per the rule of thirds.

By optimizing your angle in this way you can bring the large tree in the foreground closer to the path, and cut off much of the expanse of the pond. The eye will be directed straight down the path and you will have a truly frame worthy Japanese garden photo with one theme instead of two.

Thanks to my mom, Carol Wilkinson for this photo critique request. I’d love to see the result if you get a chance to go back to this Japanese garden to take the mossy bridge from a more optimized angle!

Stay tuned for more photo critiques, and let me know if you have a composition to submit.

Nature Photography Tips 3 – The Essence of a Great Photo

What one tip for taking nature photography would sum up the essence of the art? I’m sure there could be a dozen different answers to this question, and they would all be right, here’s what I was told yesterday.

It was the first clear day in weeks, so I took my mom to visit the private gardens of Mr. Bridgestone of Bridgestone Tires. I was hoping to get some shots of the maple and ginkgo leaves in their autumn glory through the gates and hedges. The man who was standing guard happened to be the head caretaker. To our delight, he invited us to go in to one small section of the grounds to get closeups, and later took some time to talk with us.

The subject of what is the essence of a great photo came up, and he told us he has been taking pictures for a living most of his life. His take on the question:

It’s important to know the basic principles of good photography such as the rule of three and put them to use, but that alone won’t make a photo great.

A great photo has two factors. First, it expresses what the photographer actually sees and feels. It tells a story about the situation. For instance, if it is late evening, it might show a long shadow to indicate that.

In addition to that, the photographer thinks about what the audience who views the photo will want to see. If the photo succeeds in expressing the photographer’s personal experience, and the viewer senses that and experiences the same thing with a sense of satisfaction that says, “Yes, that’s just how I would have seen it,” then you have a great photo. The key is an inner level of communication between the photographer and the viewer.

I ended up taking literally hundreds of shots yesterday. Many of them simply document what the garden looked like, but I chose these three because, although they may not be great photos, they tend to express what I was feeling. I have a huge thing for moss, and the main garden consists of a whole hillside of moss as ground cover. I wanted to protray the moist cool feel that it contributes, so I set the camera low to the ground, and let the autumn leaves be simply a background for the garden’s main feature.

The magic of being surrounded with bright maple leaves was hard to capture in a photo. I didn’t realize until I got home that the hole in the foreground branches I was shooting through for this shot was roughly heartshaped. It seemed appropriate, as I was trying to protray how I felt about the riot of color around me.

And finally, my favorite. The evening sun was streaming toward me from an angle, igniting each leaf like a thousand molten furnaces. This is one I think will end up printed out and mounted on my wall. Do click on it and view it enlarged with the black frame it makes all the difference.

I learned a valuable lesson yesterday. We’ll be continuing with the basic principles of photo composition in this Nature Photography Tips series, but I wanted to take time out to interject with a vision of what we are actually striving to achieve with all our lines and dimensions.