The Quiet Picture

Visited Järvzoo today. A somewhat windy day with grey overcast skies, absolutely hopeless for landscape photography and I don’t want to do a 2nd straight weekend of nothing but bird photography, so the zoo sounded like a good idea. I didn’t have any expectations though, there wasn’t a lot of light for shooting in the forest so I was fully prepared to be happy if I could get just one nice picture. It turned out that I got more than just one so it was definitely a good visit, and the best part of it is that I finally got a nice picture of an arctic fox! After all these years of visiting Järvzoo, I only had one arctic fox picture and I’ve kept it in my library for comic relief, because it only shows the back of the fox. But now, finally, I got the face as well! Granted, spruce forest is not the natural environment for an arctic fox but I’m not even trying to pass it as an authentic wild animal, so I’ll treat it for what it is – a zoo picture. I liked the way the spruce branches formed a frame around the fox and it seems like I made more use of the OOF foreground on this visit than I normally do… sometimes the bricks just fall that way.

I warned you that I would post some more squirrel pictures! The “problem” is that I’ve taken better squirrel pictures in the past two weeks than I’ve done in the past whatever years. The second problem is that every picture I have from the past weeks is the animal sitting on the same little perch, which only leaves me trying to catch different positions and hoping for different light.

This is my favourite from the previous week’s session. Nice position with curled tail and some blue and gold hues in the background.

While it’s nice that the squirrel faced the other direction so I get some variation, it’s probably not ideal anyway. I get a feeling that the picture is unbalanced because everything of any weight is on the left side. I tried to remedy the situation by cropping from the left to get rid of the background, which you can see in the next picture.

So now we have some more empty space on the left and the squirrel is sitting on the right side (by a whisker). But I still don’t think it’s well balanced, even if it’s better than the previous picture?

And finally, my favourite! The squirrel got nervous a couple of times and ran up the tree to calm down. I could hear it coming back down, but it moves very very quickly and it was impossible to catch it in a frame and stretched out while climbing it’s too long to fit the frame anyway. But there was this one moment when it settled on the stick and curved the tail and gave me just enough time to focus on the eye and re-compose… imagine my joy when I found that the eye is tack-sharp! Needless to say that I didn’t get a second chance at this. And please don’t break my heart by saying that it’s too tight at the bottom. I think I could get some more pine trunk from another picture and add it here if I really really must, but I’ve decided to love this picture as it is!

And wanna hear something funny? I still have some squirrel pictures left…

Sometimes when I’m on an excursion, I come back with pictures which share a common theme. It can be the subject matter or the style of photography, but you can see this thread quite clearly. The weather plays a big role on what kind of pictures I end up with, but other than that I haven’t considered myself to have a pre-conceived idea of what to do, with a few exceptions here and there (like the moonlight pictures earlier!). But when I looked at today’s crop of pictures, I started to wonder if the idea is there in the back of my mind anyway. I try to go out with an open mind so I can grab any opportunity that I come across, but I probably gravitate towards the kind of pictures I subconsciously decided I would do. It was very evident today, I took quite a lot of pictures (considering that the conditions weren’t the best possible), but when I saw them on the screen I ruthlessly deleted most of them and remaining pictures all follow the same theme – tree trunks in snow. Very simple, borderline abstract, and perfectly suited for the day. Subconscious pre-conception, adaptation to the conditions, or co-incidence? Not that it really matters… only the pictures do!

When you start photographing, your normal approach is to stand up and take the picture. It doesn’t matter what the subject is – you always stand up. If the subject is very low (say, a frog), you kneel down close enough to focus on the frog but you still take the picture from above. Unfortunately, this angle is the one that rarely works. You shouldn’t photograph children from the above, but you should kneel down to their level. You shouldn’t photograph dogs from above, but you should kneel down to their level. You shouldn’t photograph small flowers from above (well, it depends…), but you should lie down to their level. This was another hard lesson for me. I used to do a lot of photographing in zoos, but have you notice how very often you are looking down on the animals in zoos? If you have to look down, then you also have to photograph down. Sadly, this just doesn’t work. If you want to take a picture of that cute little prairie dog but do it from above, all you’ve achieved is to portray your superiority to the animal by showing that you are higher than it. It may sound a bit odd, but think about it. Any psychologist will tell you why your boss wants to sit in a higher chair than you – it’s a power trip. Same principle applies in photography, even it is not your intention to show it in your picture.

Just compare these two images – they are taken in the same zoo, in front of the same enclosure. One of them is looking down, and the other one is looking up. There’s a big difference!

Often when people talk about composition, sooner or later the phrase “rule of thirds” will enter the discussion. This is the golden mean of art – everything of importance in your image should be placed in a third. It’s easiest to explain this with an example, the image on the left is divided in 9 equal parts. The key points are where the lines cross so you should compose your image along these lines. In the above image, the horizon is in the lower third and the tree is in the lower left corner. The clouds fill upp the upper third of the image and they appear to radiate to the lower right corner filling the otherwise empty space, creating a balanced image.

Then there are the famous exceptions. Sometimes it’s better to compose centrally, instead of following the thirds. But as always – please learn the rule first, then start exploring how to break it!

Here’s the gist of it: Trees grow straight up, and horizons are always level. All you have to do is to match your photo with this reality. But, it is amazingly difficult at first. I remember it – I used to have tilted horizons and I honestly didn’t notice it until someone pointed it out to me. I started paying attention and after a while it becomes automatic – you always check for a tilt at the post processing stage. What I’m saying is that I am still not always able to take a picture which is perfectly level, not even when I use my tiny bubble level attached to the hot shoe. But as long as you can spot the tilt afterwards, and fix it, everything’s fine.

In the example on the right, there are two ways to spot the tilt. For the first, the shoreline is leaning to the left (white line). For the second, the reflection of the trees do not match with the actual trees (red line). There is less than 1 degree of rotation, but it is very obvious.

Then there are the cases where the image seems to tilt, but is in fact straight. I hate those. For example, you’re shooting a lake scenery, but you’re not at a straight angle to the opposing shore. The result is a shoreline that appears to tilt, although everything else in the image is straight. I normally trash these images – it is enough for me that the image gives an impression of tilting, it really doesn’t make any difference to me that it doesn’t.

I think the best thing to do is to make a habit on checking for a tilt in every image. After a while, you will notice even a slight tilt without using rulers and then you’ll be wondering, like I do, how you ever managed to miss a tilt!

For all you beginner photographers out there, and why not even the more advanced ones, I found a great link for composition on dPreview the other day. Please do yourself the favour of reading up. If I ever see another centrally composed photo, it will be too soon! Even if I know that I will see a bunch of them as soon as I log in to any photo forum…And yes, I will also be reading the articles. A photographer is never fully learned and I’m only in the beginning myself. I might know the basics of composition, but I can’t hold a candle to the masters of the art!