Working the Image

Sometimes you look at a scene and you immediately have an image burned into your mind.  You know exactly where to set the tripod, what lens you need, and you make the image.  Then, if you’re smart, you start working the image.  Questioning whether you, indeed, knew exactly where to stand.  Should you have been lower, higher?  Closer, a bit further away?  Maybe a bit to the left, or right?  Did you have the right focal length?  Because, the thing is, you never really know whether you got the best image possible on that first crack at it.  Sometimes you do; more often than not, one of the latter images is even better!

Another context where that happens is when you look out at a scene and a concept comes to mind.  It’s much less specific than, “I have to make that exact image, right there!” but it’s just as compelling.  You know something is there, you see fragments of it, and you just have to work it out.  So you start and you keep working the image until you’re sure you’ve got it, or you can’t think of anything more to do.  Then you wait till you get home to see if there’s anything there.  

I had one of those latter experiences during our April trip to the Painted Hills.  It was when I looked southward across the grassy flat area towards a giant hillside towards the end of our morning's efforts.  I looked across the field for quite a while, wanting to take advantage of the textures of the grasses.  Eventually I returned to the notion of making clean, minimal imagery instead of landscapes, and the concept of this flat field running up to a diagonal of hillside and sky came to mind.  Three simple masses.

Now the image is a bit deceiving because there’s quite a distance between the grassy area and the hill.  The road to the western part of the Painted Hills runs in-between the edge of the grasses, descending as it runs by.  Still, a sense of space and depth wasn’t what I was going for, the abstraction of the forms was the concept.  

So I walked out to an area where I thought the textures would work, and put a slight telephoto lens on the camera.  In part to flatten the perspective a bit, in part to emphasize the diagonal.  Fortunately, the clouds that were around that morning were hugging the horizon and that added some texture to the sky as well.

After that image, I looked at the scene, and decided that I wasn’t convinced that the diagonal cutting the frame from side to top was the best approach, so I considered including a bit of the sky across the entire top edge.  It was at that point that I also noticed the V shaped feature towards the top of the hill, which was entirely excluded from my first effort.  

So I moved a bit backwards and to the right and put on a normal lens.  This added a bit of depth to the image, especially the field flowing into the draw and up the hill to the V, but I went with it as still a minimalist landscape.

As I considered how I could do something different with this subject, I realized I was standing near a bush, so I thought I’d try to incorporate that into the foreground a bit.  So I moved backward and over, yet again, and put on a slightly wide angle lens.

The wide angle lens gave me much greater sense of perspective and I realized that I was really deviating from the original concept I had.  That foreground bush was way too strong and the wide angle lens wound up having me capture some of the distant hills.  Definitely out of concept.

So I moved even farther back, still thinking I would work with the bush, and switched back to the normal focal length lens to keep a somewhat similar framing.  That flattened things a bit.

But not quite enough.

I decided the bush was just a bit too much, so I moved forward to emphasize the dark balls that stuck up out of the grasses and dropped the bush altogether, moving a bit left as well.

However, in my framing I tried to incorporate another bush.  But what that wound up giving me was too much flat hilltop on the image, which lost that strong send of a diagonal I had originally conceived.  

So I swung the camera to the left a bit, focusing on the hillside V as my stopping point instead of worrying about what was happening on the field below. 

By that point I had pretty much tried everything I could think of and would have to wait to check out the images when I got home.  I still have a difficult time reviewing images out in the field to see if there’s more I can do, but it’s tough when you’re looking at a small screen on the back of the camera to make those kinds of judgments.  It gets even harder at the end of a long morning's work once your brain starts deciding it's exhausted (and your stomach tells you you're starving). 

Looking at the images now, I should have moved left and put on the short telephoto again to have a foreground of light grasses and the two masses of hillside and sky.  That would have been the most minimal of all.  

In the end, I think that the first image is the best of the lot.  The minimalist approach is consistent with the concept of focusing on major masses in the frame and letting and letting the textures of each of the masses give the eye something to explore instead of primary “subjects.”  

I guess it also helped that the light was just a bit more directional in the first image than the other images (if you look carefully, you can see a slight shadow cast in one of the draws that isn’t present in the other images.  By this point in the morning, the clouds were starting to form in the east.  And while not too thick, they offered a diffuse light that didn’t help separate the texture in the hillside as much as more directed lighting would have.  That directional light is also there in the first of the landscape images, which is perhaps why it stands out a bit too.  

While I can’t say that any of the images are spectacular, it wasn’t for lack of working the image!