We all hunt down photographs in our own inimitable ways. No one's right and no one's wrong. Walker Evans would work all day and expose six sheets of film; Pete Turner was once photographed reclining on a mountain of his discarded slides. It's up to every individual how they work, how they do things.
Over the years, however, I've noticed that I have a pretty clear pattern. Most of the time. My friend Kim Kirkpatrick once said something that always stuck with me—he said that he sometimes knows when he's at a place that there's a photograph "there somewhere" even though he might not know what it is right away. I get that too. Often, I'll sort of sense that something's there, and I'll have to work the subject till I find it—work toward the picture, sort of grope my way to it, bit by bit, frame by frame. Trying, discarding, looking again. I do that again and again.
What follows is a trivial example, but it's a very clean example. It just shows the way I work.
I checked the file numbers and these frames go from XX388 to XX412, and I checked the timestamps—the first one was taken at 9:21:26 p.m. and the last one at 9:25 p.m. So I took 24 exposures in a little more than three and a half minutes. That's pretty typical.
So here's the snapshot version. See something, take a snap.
Move in on the subject a little.
But the picture has no point, no center of interest, no "focus." So I'll try concentrating on his face more. But the light is obviously atrocious, and I can't even see his face. But it's this shot where I see that there's something going on with those legs.
So try that and yeah, that's where the picture is, not his face. But of course now it's not composed in the frame.
So do that, and there you are.
In processing: the color is not only contributing nothing, but is actually actively ugly, so get rid of that. Very simple processing—add a little vignetting to bring down the top corners, add just a touch of "Structure" (Nik Silver Efex Pro 2's term for added microcontrast), and balance the tones, then run my regular routines for print color (a touch of sepia) and edges and I've got my picture:
My picture. This might not be the picture you would have found—hopefully not; in any given situation you would have found something that appealed to you. You would have done it your way.
I've gone from the one on the left to the one on the right. Might seem pretty obvious when you look at it this way! Might not have taken you 24 shots and 3.5 minutes. But did you envision the finished picture when you first saw the one on the left, the snapshot version, at the top of this post? Again, though, I'm not talking about this specific image—it's just an example. I'm talking about the process I go through when I shoot. That process of exploring, probing, working the subject. I find myself doing something similar to this over and over again.
And when I don't find something fairly easily, what I like to do is...give up. Montaigne, talking about encountering difficult passages in a book, says, "I do not bite my nails over them; after making one or two attempts I give them up.... What I do not see immediately ["soon" would be a better word in my case], I see even less by persisting. Without lightness, I achieve nothing; application and over-serious effort confuse, depress, and weary my brain."
I like that. Don't press too hard. Just look at the thing for a while, and, if nothing's happening, shrug and move on. You'll know it if you're on the trail of a picture.
Of course there are a thousand ways to find a picture, and this is only one of those ways. It's not better or worse than other ways. It just fits me.
Tomorrow over morning coffee I'll talk about why this picture is only halfway home at this point.
Mike
"Open Mike" is the anything-goes page of TOP, and isn't even always off-topic (although I don't usually talk about my own pics on weekdays.)
Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
No featured comments yet—please check back soon!
