Bruce Barnbaum - The Art of Photography - An Approach to Personal Expression

In my workshops, I ask students the following question when reviewing their work: “What are you trying to say, and what are you trying to communicate in the work you’re showing us here?” The reason for the question is to force students to express the relationship they feel to their subject matter. In essence, I encourage students to focus more deeply on their own interests, for unless you know yourself well you’ll always be groping around for subjects to shoot. You will produce little of interest until you find your area of interest.

Rules, Formulas, and Other Problems and Pitfalls

Before ending this chapter, I’d like to examine several pitfalls that can ruin potentially fine photographs. The first—and worst—is looking for, or following, “rules” of composition. Rules are foolish, arbitrary, mindless things that raise you quickly to a level of acceptable mediocrity, then prevent you from progressing further. Several of the most well-known rules—the rule of thirds, the rule of avoiding a horizon in the center of an image, the rule of having an image read from left to right, the rule of not placing the center of interest in the center of the image, and so many others—are undesirable constraints with no validity. (Just look at Ansel Adams’s “Moonrise over Hernandez” to see how many rules are broken.) Again, heed Edward Weston’s words that “Good composition is the strongest way of seeing.” If your composition happens to adhere to rules, fine! If it happens to break rules, fine! Forget the rules; just make always strong images.

Related to following rules is the common pitfall of following formulas. As an example, if you successfully increased contrast on a softly lit cloudy day, does that always indicate that you should increase contrast on a softly lit sunny day? Of course not! Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t! If you dramatically enhanced contrast by using a red filter on a sunny day with deep blue sky and puffy white clouds, should you always use a red filter on that kind of day? Of course not! Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t! Your goals may change from day to day—even under similar circumstances—and changing conditions may force a change in your approach. Avoid rules. Avoid formulas. Look at each individual case on its own merits.

Another common problem is the inadvertent inclusion of distracting areas or objects in an image. As photographers, we often get so involved with the object of prime importance that we fail to see distractions that intrude into the frame. How often have you seen pictures of spectacular landscapes marred by such things as power lines in an upper corner or a yellow trash can in a lower corner? Or pictures where the top of a camper-trailer peeks into the bottom of the frame below the waterfall? Or pictures of a friend or relative with a distant tree or phone pole appearing to come right out of the top of his or her head?

These annoyances can be avoided by studying the composition for just a few seconds before tripping the shutter. Run your eyes around the edge of the image—all four sides—to see if there are intrusions that pull your eye from the important areas. I have dubbed this “border patrol”. See if there are strong contrasts or bright objects at the edges or corners of the view-finder or ground glass that may prove distracting. You may be able to crop them out, or you may be able to deal with them effectively in printing, but beware of them when exposing your image. In many cases, simply turning your camera to the left or right, up or down, just a degree or two can eliminate the problem.

Study the whole frame to see what percentage of it is visually interesting. If the frame is filled with unnecessary or distracting elements, eliminate them entirely or at least reduce them significantly. If you cannot reduce these distractions, just enjoy the scene and make a “mental image” of it. You may be attracted to the distant mountain with its mantle of gleaming snow, but it may be 30 miles away and even your longest lens will take in too much of the landscape in front of that peak. You may still want the picture, but when you show it to others—people who weren’t at your side when you took the shot, and who are responding only to the photograph—they may not react as positively as you expect because you fail to show them anything exciting. You are showing them an expanse of flat land with a little spot of white in the center where that distant mountain stands.

A good memory is better than a bad photograph any day! Discipline yourself to put the camera away without taking the picture. This is also true for standard and digital SLRs. One of the greatest pitfalls of being able to work quickly is snapping off far too many exposures. It can be almost addictive. But it’s rarely productive. Putting the camera away without making a photograph is often the hardest thing to do. Most people seem to have an uncontrollable need to take a picture once they pull out the camera. It’s like drug addiction. They quiver and shake if they put the camera away without first pressing that little button on the top. Once they press that button, all is well. It matters little that the image is awful, it was taken and that’s what counts!

Of course, that’s not what counts. What counts is saying something meaningful, producing something with impact and insight. Millions of people each year take pictures in places of outstanding natural beauty and show them to friends and relatives afterwards. And they say, “You really should have been there.” It’s undoubtedly a true statement, because the snapshots fail to tell you anything. It was a beautiful scene, to be sure, but not a well-conceived photograph. These snapshots are constantly taken by people with no understanding of the elements of composition that form the basis of a real photograph.

Blurred objects are another pitfall to watch out for. When shooting with 35mm or digital cameras, stop the shutter down to the f/stop at which the picture will be taken just to see if there are any blurred or unseen objects close to the lens that could become fuzzy intrusions once the shutter automatically stops down to the preset aperture. This may occur in a forest, for example, where there are cross branches everywhere. As you position your camera, the branch that is inches from the lens and unseen at f/2 becomes an ugly blur at f/16.

The human eye’s three-degree angle of sharp vision makes it easy to overlook the distractions that are in the frame, away from points of high interest. You must be aware of the entire picture space in order to direct the viewer’s attention to the important areas, not to the distractions. The distractions can often be avoided before the photograph is exposed, but rarely afterwards. Look for such distractions as much as you look for the good compositional interactions because they represent weaknesses in your image. Every good photograph reduces the weaknesses while accentuating the strengths; the finest photographs eliminate the weaknesses entirely.

Sometimes a simple cropping of the final image is all that is needed. Photographers who work digitally or in the darkroom regularly crop their images, but many 35mm slide shooters seem to abhor that concept with a passion. To them there is a pervasive religious feeling that God created the world in 35mm format and nothing should be allowed to violate that sacrosanct shape. Today, however, some of that thinking has thankfully been overcome by those who scan original film transparencies for digital printing, and then they seem more amenable to cropping the scanned image. That’s a real step forward. If cropping strengthens the image, crop it! There is no reason to avoid a long, narrow composition or a square format if it enhances the total effect. You may even want to break all the rules by considering a non-rectangular format!