In late August of 2024, I made a visit to the Waupaca River Fishery Area which is just a few miles from my house, to scout opportunities for photographing fall foliage. It turned out not to be a location well suited for that particular purpose, but I did enjoy sitting listening to the river and practicing a meditation I had downloaded from a photographer I follow on You Tube.
It was a little buggy that day and by this time the wildflowers were past their peak, but as long as I was there I decided to get some test shots for a return visit in the spring. As often happens, those did not turn out quite as I had envisioned. In this instance it was the compositions that I was not very happy with. I am including three of those images here, along with some notes about what I learned in the process.
The two images above are of the same group of flowers, just taken with different shutter speeds so I could decide which I like better. I personally prefer the slightly darker image, but the thing I actually want to talk about here is the composition. You can see that there are some rather distracting leaves in the foreground and even though they are blurred, they still confuse the eye of the viewer. Even utilizing a square crop didn’t help much. I should have moved in a little closer, or slid just a bit to the right in order to get a cleaner image with less clutter.
This close up of some other Black-eyed Susans is a little better, at least the foreground is blurred more thanks to the longer focal length and slightly lower f-stop. But there is still too much going on, especially with the little clump of berries in the upper right corner of the frame. It would take some pretty aggressive cropping to edit those out, and that would remove pretty much all of the context of this image. I should have adjusted my angle a bit, or moved slightly to the right to get a clearer view of my subject with fewer distracting elements.
To me, the common flaw in all these images is that I did not take my time. I saw something that I thought was interesting and might make a good photograph, and just took the shot without considering the surroundings. They could definitely have been improved with just a bit more attention to my intended subject and what I could do to isolate it or minimize distractions in order to draw the viewers’ eyes to what I was seeing with mine.
This is a problem I am noticing quite frequently as I go back through the images I have captured over the last several months. It is a lesson I will no doubt need to continue to learn many more times before it becomes a natural part of my process. That’s okay. While I am far from being new to photography, it is a skill I have not practiced much in recent years and it will take time and practice for me to get used to seeing and thinking like a photographer again.
Addendum
While I was at the fishery area, I also decided to do some experimentation with ICM and double exposures. Two of those images I was reasonably happy with, especially since I am new to both of these techniques, and they can be found in my portfolio or viewed via the thumbnail links below.
