Take a walk to keep your shooting eye sharp

A typical assignent given at photography workshops is to have the participants produce images in what would be a rather mundane setting. It could be a parking lot, the meeting room, or any other normal, everyday location.  The purpose of the exercise is to help the photographer view the world around them with a more critical and creative eye.  Once the photographer obtains the mindset to view everything around them as a potential image, their lives are never the same.

Occasionally I lose my shooter's eye.  I get caught up in the day-to-day activities of living and veer away from the special quality of viewing everything around me as a potential photograph.  It's not that I haven't been doing much image-making lately, it's just that the shooting I have been doing has been with an end result in mind.  For example, on my way to an assignment yesterday I decided to shoot some stock images of a hospital complex nearby.  So I spent a half-hour or so shooting for an end-result: stock architectural images.

There is nothing wrong with that, in fact it is very important to shoot with a result in mind.  But in order to keep the minds-eye sharp and from getting stale, it is a good idea to once in a while pick up the camera with a good all-purpose lens attached (I like the Canon 15-85mm zoom with image stabilization on my EOS 50D) and just start walking.

This morning I did just that.  I needed to pick something up for breakfast so I decided to take a round-about way to get to the store and see what I came upon for subject matter.  Serendipity would need to be my friend in this exercise.  It would prove to be a good pal indeed.




After leaving the house just before 8, I took a right turn and my shadow on a wood fence I walk by everyday during my morning constitutions provided my first image-making opportunity.  I took a few shots holding the camera at my mid-section to get a feel of the angle.  Then I realized I needed something more dynamic to make the picture work so I raised one arm and pointed. "Let's go this way!" 

Serendipity is a funny thing.  A million times every minute a great happen-chance image presents itself but only an infinitesimally small fraction of those events has a photographer waiting with a camera pointed in the right direction. I had taken a handful of bird shots on the half-mile I had walked so far...nothing too exciting but it got me thinking about the subject matter.  Last night I noticed a huge gathering of birds near where I went to pick up dinner.  "Must be migration season," I thought.  I also noticed the setting, waning moon earlier and tried to get it into a couple of compositions.  I was focusing on some birds perched on telephone wires when this flock came out of the north.  I followed the vector through the viewfinder, firing a few frames until the birds passed by the moon.  Serendipity? Yes, but without being in the "observation" game, this would have been one of those moments that would have passed by without capture.  The moral:  Be prepared, be in the game, and serendipitous moments will happen.



Cat tails and rushes by a low-water creek normally wouldn't provide anything to the photographer more than a very mundane image.  But a shaft of sunlight piecing its way through the trees created this dramatic scene.  Photography is highlights and shadows and this shot captures both. 





A picture within a picture -- Sometimes a good  image is hidden within what on the surface looks to be a fairly ordinary photograph.   I was trying to compose a shot of a pet waste receptacle along this walkway hoping for the appearance of a dog and owner to complete the visual  when a man on foot and what appeared to be his two sons on bikes passed me by.  I quickly fired off a couple of frames but the juxtaposition wasn't quite right, and beside, what did bikers and walkers have to do with cleaning up after your pet.  As the trio moved down the pathway, I fired off a couple more long shots with the subjects rather small in the frame.  After getting home and editing the frames, a tighter crop produced a nice backlight image of a universally appealing event.  If you shoot with a high enough resolution, fast enough shutter speed and low enough film speed, you can turn average shots  into more desirable ones. 





Stock photo opportunities can come from anywhere.  After I came out of the grocery store with cinnamon roll makings for breakfast (remember, that was the reason for excursion), I spotted the pumpkin display.  A couple quick exposures and I had a nice seasonal stock shot.



To make an image-making opportunity more successful, a photographer needs to draw on past experiences behind the camera.  This shot is a good example.  With plenty of satisfying shots from my walk already on the CF card all I needed to do was cross over the busy road that separated me from home and a well-deserved breakfast.  Forty-five minutes earlier I had composed a similar shot with the setting moon in the background so I knew how the stop sign could play into a composition.  I have often experimented with shutter speeds and their effect on the representation of speed on moving objects.  A shutter speed of of 1/25th of second did the trick.



Home at last with the goods.