Photography, Digital and Otherwise

I’m not a professional, but I’ve been taking pictures for over 40 years with a very broad array of cameras from an old Argus twin-lens reflex through Instamatic-style with 110 and 127 cartridge films through 35mm point-and-shoot and SLRs. I started shooting digital with an Olympus point-and-shoot, migrating through an Olympus C2100uz semi-pro p&s to a Nikon D40 and now D60. As you can see, I’ve used pretty much the same kinds of cameras you’re using yourselves.

As such, and seeing the effort so many of you put into your images, I’m wondering if you’d be interested in a short series of discussions about photography in general. I don’t mean getting into the nitty-gritty of what f-stop to use at what shutter speed — this kind of work needs a one-on-one aspect that I try to give in my critiques; of which I’m not trying to hurt your feelings or criticize your skills, but rather help you to see how a tiny change might have made your already-excellent picture even better! However, I’ve also seen how so many of you completely overlook a possiblity that could make an OUTSTANDING picture!

I believe I’ve mentioned that my wife gave me a D60 Nikon for my birthday primarily so she could adopt the D40 she’d given me the year before. Personally, I think she got the better end of the deal, even though the D60 has some capabilities the D40 doesn’t. She immediately wanted to go out and do some photography, and we have the advantage of living right on the Chesapeake Bay very near the Elk Neck State Park. Of course, this includes the Elk Neck lighthouse.

I need to interrupt myself here to mention that my wife is no stranger to photography. In high school she took a photography course and the school issued her a basic 35mm SLR to use for her assignments. She understands most of the basics behind photography, but was disappointed when most of her shots came out looking more like ordinary point-and-shoot snapshots without the artistic flair she knew she could achieve. This is where Elk Neck comes in.

We drove down to the parking area late one afternoon. We discovered that the lighthouse area closes around 7pm (or dusk, whichever comes first) so we didn’t have time to walk the half-mile down the peninsula to the point, where the lighthouse itself stands. Still, she wanted to take some pictures and began walking around, snapping photos of boats on the bay and even trying for some more distant targets like the Amtrak bridges over the Susquehanna river. This whole time she’d been walking around and under a big obstacle that she didn’t want encroaching on her pictures.

She continued snapping away for a bit, then told me she was ready to go. I asked her to let me view what she’d taken, and I couldn’t argue she’d made some nice choices. Finally I asked her if she’d seen any other noteworthy subjects. Her reply? “No.” I looked at her a second, and then told her, “Turn around.”

This is what she saw:

We have a poster-sized print of this hanging in our living room.

The original image is in color. All she did when she got home was to convert it to B&W, add a little Red filter to darken the sky, and tweak the contrast a tiny amount — all things a film photographer would have done in his darkroom without the benefit of a computer.

Of course, once she realized how she’d overlooked such a remarkable image, she began following a rule all photographers need to obey:

Turn Around.

Don’t get so stuck on what you’re looking at that you so completely overlook another opportunity right under your nose (or over your head, in this case.)

A few weeks later we went out to the same site and took some more pictures. Nothing else really stood out for either of us, but we noticed the clouds overhead were beginning to form some interesting patterns. Attaching a polarizing filter to her lens, my wife again began snapping away. When she finished tweaking one of the images, she came out with…:

Again, she made it B&W and again added just a bit of red filter to darken the blue of the sky. If it looks somewhat familiar, this type of sky is often seen in the color plate paintings in a family Bible.

Keep your eyes open. Try to see beyond the obvious… while your at it, try to look at the obvious, too. You’d be surprised what kind of images you’ll find.

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