Welcome back to another Behind the Camera feature. This is a monthly post where I choose something to talk about that might benefit photographers, or those that enjoy looking at photographs. I try to make this both educational and enjoyable while sharing a bit about myself and my process. This month, I am going to talk about a well-known saying in photography that says, “It’s not what you shoot, but how you shoot it.” I’m not sure who said it first, and doing a quick search brings about all kinds of unrelated meanings of the sentiment. I’m going to keep it based in photography which is where I have heard it the most.
Now, I’m not going to insult anyone’s intelligence by explaining what the quote means at face value. I think we are all quite capable of understanding that the key is to photograph something in an interesting way rather than just photographing something interesting. How that works out can take on many different looks though. Good, and even great photography has no relation to the subject matter as boring photos can be captured even in the most epic of places, and if done creatively, a white wall can become an inspired subject. Of course, if you find yourself in an epic location under great light the chances of capturing a pretty photograph are much increased. I’ve been in those situations before where no matter where I pointed the camera the photos turned out wonderful. There is just no skill involved with this kind of photography and it doesn’t prepare you at all for those times when everything isn’t perfect. Let’s be honest here, how many times in our lives will we find everything to be perfect?
The skill that we must work on is the how we shoot it part. If we can master that aspect, the what in the equation no longer matters as much. We can go out with the confidence that no matter what we are faced with, we can successfully make a photograph. Notice that I didn’t say anything about “taking” a photograph? There is a huge difference there and it ties back into the topic of this entry. Anyone can take a photograph of what is in front of them. It can be done with a cell phone, Polaroid camera, disposable camera, or any other lightproof box with a shutter. You just point to what is pretty and take the photo that is presented. I kind of talked about this last month when I presented my thoughts on deciding on a composition. By using that method, or any other method for coming up with a composition and how you want to represent the scene, you are leaving that realm of taking a photo and you are moving closer to making that photo. Yep, you create the photo that is captured through composition, use of light, and deciding what suits the overall scene the best. This is effectively how you shoot it.
Not that long ago, I went out with the odd idea of photographing road markings. Yep, those painted markings on the road that everyone has seen and probably pays very little attention to unless they are driving and the argument can be made that attention is limited in those situations as well, for many drivers. I doubt that anyone wakes up in the morning and says to themselves….Self….I’m going to go and photograph some random paint on asphalt today. The expected reaction would be to tell yourself to go back to sleep, you are having a weird dream. I get that, but then again, I woke up and was thinking that very thing and decided to act on it one day.
I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out and I had very little preconceived notions about any success with it. However, when I came back and finished processing the images I knew that I was onto something. In fact, it was this trek that had me looking through my collection of ideas for Behind the Camera and spotting this topic, knowing that it was the right time to talk about it. By no means was this the first time that I have gone out and looked for mundane subjects, but I would have to say that this particular subject was just a little more mundane than what I was used to.
Before I went out, I did a quick search for artistic renderings of road markings and a few variations on those search terms. I ended up with nothing except for artistically painted road markings which were captured by a camera in a matter-of-fact way. I saw a lot of photographs of different road markings, but they were all there to document the different road markings and nothing more. The search gave me pause for my goal of creating some form of artwork with this subject. Could it even be done? Would I be able to make it work? I really thought that I was going to be in over my head and would come back with wasted frames. I was OK with that possible outcome and knew that it would either work or wouldn’t. I wasn’t traveling far to get to the road markings which meant that I wasn’t out much time at all which is another argument for shooting the non-epic locations.
When I did find the right road markings for the look that I was after, I set out to photograph them in a way that wasn’t based so much in what I was photographing, but how I was photographing it. I wanted a bit of an abstract feel to it, I wanted it to be very high contrast black and white, and I wanted the shapes to stand out. I wanted to create something that would cause people to look a little further into the image than just seeing some road markings. Whether or not I was successful on that front has yet to determined, but I have had some very positive feedback about the energy that the photos have captured. That energy has nothing at all to do with the direction of the arrows and what they were telling traffic to do, but with how I photographed them.
In the terms of “artistic photography,” the photographer is never just documenting that they were there, or that they saw something. That is just not the purpose of art. What we are trying to do is capture how that scene made us feel, and to show the parts of it that really interested us because of how we saw something. As visual creatures, we see all kinds of scenes throughout the day. Most just pass us by, but there are those scenes that grab our attention and our imagination. For those who regularly capture those kinds of scenes, this happens more often than for those who haven’t trained themselves to see things in interesting ways. All this is to say that a photographer is more likely to see something in an interesting way than a non-photographer. It is then up to that photographer to know how to shoot that scene so that they convey what is interesting to others.
I’ve pretty much established the bar for what I am talking about with the road markings, but this concept applies to all kinds of scenes. This photo is of a bench sitting next to a barrel that is there for decoration at a local restaurant. I imagine that hundreds of people walk past this scene and sit here during a week. It is not something that we would necessarily think of as a photo, but on this particular day when I was on a photo walk in town, I saw how the light was hitting these two elements. There was something magical about the moment and I wanted to capture that particular moment, not the subject. This photo had nothing to with what I was shooting, but how I chose to shoot it.
The composition was very restricted so that the actual “what” of the scene wasn’t quite as clear to the viewer. What was clear was the way that the shapes and light worked together. The deep shadow that provided the separation between the elements and the warm highlights in a largely monochromatic scene gave tons of visual interest for the viewer to look at. The way that I photographed this scene actually removed the importance of what the subjects actually are. I’m sure that if a viewer looks at this long enough, they will be able to determine roughly what they are seeing, but that is not the point of the photograph at all. The point is how the light and the shapes work together. The photograph then sparks a reaction in the viewer that has nothing to do with wanting to sit down, or how it feels to wait for your name to be called to come to your table. It is a much more intimate and personal feeling that you experience. That reaction is based 100% on how I shot this photo, not what the photo is of.
When it comes to how you choose to capture a scene, you have to take into account all of the tools at your disposal. For a photographer, this goes well beyond what camera you are using. In fact, the camera is largely insignificant. The camera is just a lightproof box with a shutter in all reality. The real key comes in the form of lens selection as that will dictate how the scene is represented within the camera. In the situation I found myself in with the photo above, I wanted to emphasize the shapes of the building more than just the building itself. While the architecture is a little modern for the area of Wilkes County, the building is not all that special just to look at, and I imagine that most of the people that walk by don’t hardly notice it for the design. For me, I loved how the windows formed opposing lines and the patterns they created. I liked the dramatic way that the second story had an extension that provided a lower walkway, but that it didn’t continue through the length of the building. Now, to photograph this in a purely documentary fashion would leave it looking like a…well…building. I chose to get in very close and capture it with a wide-angle focal length to distort the proportions of the building. This added quite a bit to the visual interest and changed the way that the building looked so that the parts that interested me became very obvious.
The next tool that I used was a polarizer because I really wanted to make this a high contrast image to focus on the shapes and not necessarily the subject. By using the filter, I was able to darken the sky to a very deep blue, and I was able to remove the reflections and glare from the glass rendering them nearly black. The filter was a conscious choice to arrive at a certain look which brought me into the realm of how I was shooting this building, not so much that I was shooting a building.
To further my goal of a high contrast image to show off the lines and shapes, I made the decision to do this as a black and white photograph. By removing the color, I was able to bring the structure of the building into the tonal range of white while the sky and the glass were reduced to black. The brick portions were a light gray which just added a middle tone to the image while not adding to the visual complexity. All of these choices were designed to represent the aspects of the building that interested me. It all became the recipe for how I chose to capture it. There is a bit of a sci-fi feeling to the scene now even though this is just a building at a community college which shows the power of the choices that we make as a photographer as to how we make an image.
There is a lot of thought that really goes into how a photograph is constructed. Take for example this scene that was shot towards the end of Winter. I had been out hunting a good scene to work and spotted this old truck as I was coming around a corner. It was parked in front of a concrete building that was in a state of collapse. There was a large barn in the background and a small structure that might have been a house off to the left. It was the truck that drew me in, but I was worried about the distractions behind it and how I would be able to photograph it successfully. I wasn’t able to find anyone to get permission to access the property, so I had to work from a distance.
If I was concerned with just the what that I was photographing, I would have grabbed a quick shot of the truck and moved on. I would have captured the truck that had struck a chord with me and that should be sufficient. The problem is, that photo would not have been a strong photograph and would not have captured what I saw about the truck and how it made me feel. I needed to do some thinking about how to convey all of those things. As I was working the scene, I had a crazy idea to capture the entire scene with all the distractions in it as well. The logic here was that everything fed into the meaning behind the truck and created a backstory for it. Now, I could have slapped on the wide-angle lens and just captured everything in a single shot, but that would have left things like the small building to the left lost in the scene and the elements behind the truck just adding to the visual weight of the truck. I needed a way to keep those elements individual and for that, I needed to use a longer focal length for a bit more compression to the scene. There I go again, considering the tools that I had available to me.
With that choice, there was no way to capture the entire scene unless I moved into the next town and shot from a distance (exaggerating here). Another one of the tools that I had at my disposal was the ability to stitch together a panorama which would allow me to make the scene as wide as I needed it to be while keeping the compression from the long lens. The added benefit would be less sky and foreground included which would draw the attention more effectively to the main subjects. I still needed to get rather far away and found myself up on the embankment across the road to get the right perspective on the scene.
The composition that I chose was based on the two main subjects which were the truck and the small building to the left. There were other players in the scene, but they were not as significant. The small structure to the far left was used along with the trees to frame the image on the left as well as help to establish the block building as a framing element to the right. That was accomplished by cropping the image just outside of the corner of the building so that the distance from the corner to the edge of the frame was around the same distance as the area between the small side building and the left edge. This gave a sense of balance to the image while keeping the block building from becoming a heavier visual weight.
Another tool that I had at my disposal was the use of colors and how those colors were represented in the scene. This is often referred to as color grading in cinema and that phrase as entered into stills photography here of late because it sounds cool. I needed the truck to stand out more than the other elements in the scene and with it being red, that was really quite easy to do. However, with the way that the colors were actually seen in the scene, the truck overpowered the rest of the elements and became too heavy on the right. By working the relationships with the colors, I dialed back the red of the truck, while leaning into the magenta of the rest of the scene. This gave a more unified color palette throughout the photo while the more pure red of the truck kept it prominent without being overbearing. The colors now created a scene that flowed and allowed the viewer to take it all in without fighting through an imbalance.
The what of the scene that I had captured was still very present, but because of the how of the capture the photo is much more interesting and tells a more complete story. The thing is, when a viewer is looking at a photo, they are only seeing the what. As photographers, this is something that we have to keep in mind. Your average viewer will look at your images at face value and only see the subject that you are photographing and what has been put within the frame. This is not to say that all the effort behind the how is lost or shouldn’t be important. In fact, it is quite the opposite in my opinion. If we don’t pay attention to the how part of the equation, the viewer will not be interested enough in the what to really look at the photo more than for a passing moment. The choices that we make create the difference between a patty of ground beef on a plate and a steakhouse burger with all the fixings. Every choice that we make when it comes to how we capture a photo will determine how interesting the subject becomes and therefore how interesting the photo itself becomes.
Smoke…other than being a sign of fire which could possibly be a problem, smoke is not necessarily an interesting subject in terms of photography. It can provide some atmosphere and mystery to a scene and that is where we see it most often in photography. The smoke itself is never the subject and you have to ask yourself why. The simple answer is that smoke is just not that interesting on its own, so it would make a terrible what to photograph. Or would it?
In the photo above, the smoke is the main subject, and really the only subject in the frame. I would argue that this is an interesting photo in spite of the boring subject. Let’s unpack why that is. It all comes down to how I chose to capture the smoke. I simply used the tools that were available to me to make it happen. First of all, I needed to create smoke which was done through the use of a single incense cone that was lit. This gave me a very specific stream of smoke…boring…but easily seen. Now I had to make it interesting in order to have a successful photo of it.
In order to see the smoke in a photograph, it has to be lit from the side or behind. This called for an off-camera flash positioned to the right side of the frame. This made the smoke look white as it now matched the color of the light. In order to make it stand out even more; I set up a black backdrop to add to the contrast and remove the distractions that would show up from the studio in the background. This gave me the basis for the photo as the flash duration was something like 1/3000 of a second which effectively froze the smoke every time an exposure was made. Now I had a white stream flowing through the frame that had nice contrast, but I was still just photographing smoke, or the what in the equation.
By waving my hand slowly, or blowing at the stream of smoke, I would cause the stream to become disrupted and other shapes would be created by the smoke. If my timing was right, I would be able to capture those shapes which would immediately transform the boring smoke into something abstract and potentially beautiful. All of a sudden, I was changing up the how and creating something so much more visually pleasing than just a stream of smoke coming from a cone of incense. That was phase one.
Phase two came after the cone of incense had burned out and the smoke show was over. It was now time to bring the photos into Lightroom and start working on the processing of them. I chose the most interesting smoke patterns and designs and started the processing with those. I added colors to areas to further what I was seeing in the abstract shapes. The colors were all based on color theory and/or how I was seeing the shapes develop. It was through the colors that the smoke became a canvas of sorts for the real creativity to start. It was always the smoke that was being photographed, but the choices that I made during and after the capture were what made the photo. What you are really seeing and appreciating are those decisions rather than the actual subject.
Do you see the difference now? In photography, the what can be absolutely anything. It can be that epic vista or amazing event. It can also be a stack of spare tires, or a tree, maybe even a brick wall. The subjects can be anything at all, and they don’t even have to be exciting. What makes any of these subjects interesting, exciting, and unique is how the photographer chooses to capture them. That will always be the most important part of a photograph and the part that makes the difference between a snapshot and a considered piece of art. Don’t limit yourself to just shooting pretty scenes or interesting subjects. Start paying attention to how you capture any of these subjects and you will see that your photography improves in ways that you never would have suspected. Just keep in mind that how you shoot is much more important than what you shoot.
Thank you so much for joining me for this month’s Behind the Camera. I really hope that you have enjoyed it and that it has brought a bit of clarity to how photographs can be created. If you are a photographer and would like help in how you capture scenes, I do offer mentorships and would love to put together a plan to help achieve your goals. If you aren’t a photographer and just enjoy looking at the photos, I hope that this gives you a deeper appreciation for the process behind the photos. Of course, if you have favorite photos of mine, I would love to match you up with a print of your choice so that you can enjoy my work on your walls where it deserves to be.
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Until next time…
