Tutorial - Field Workshop Introduction

TUTORIAL

Field Workshop Introduction

Transcript of Field Workshop Introduction Video:

Photographically, the big scenes are seductive because they sort of sum up the place. They’re also probably the quickest path toward making a boring photograph.

That doesn't mean that you don’t take the big scenes, because we all like remembering where we were. We all like the postcards, the “we were there” pictures, those sorts of things.

But if you start to look at some of the smaller scenes, whether it’s the surf on the rocks and all of the plant life that is surviving in the tidal zone, the fallen trees making a kind of sculpture over the rocks, or whether it is the form of the rock itself, any clues that you decide to give as to location and scale are discretionary. You don’t have to tell a story that places any of this in space or time, that is up to you.

What I would really encourage you to do is to make the visual design of whatever you are looking at be the overriding consideration in terms of what you make a photograph of. But even then there is another issue out here. Because we may be looking at some rocks and say “wow that’s a really neat pattern,” But half of the pattern is formed in our mind from what we can barely perceive as there.

It is not an overtly visual thing; it’s as much an intellectual perception of a fracture as it is a visual manifestation of that fracture. Out here, the shade is as important as the rock. The shapes that the shadows make are as important as the shapes the rocks themselves make, or perhaps even more so to say, that sunlight and shade really do define the nature of the photograph.

After all, we are not getting the rock on the sensor, we are getting light and dark. We are writing with light, and you have to keep that in mind. Distance doesn't matter to the camera except where it’s going to be sharp or not, what matters is your sense of what you can see in a 2 dimensional representation of the light. And that may mean something small, something large, but overriding that you have to decide that the balance of the light and dark in the frame is giving you the design and the kind of emotional response to the landscape that you have in mind.

Steve leading a Field Trip with Maine Media Workshop: "Vision and Craft: Perfecting the Photographic Image."
Video by Reid Elem

Often times you've got to almost strip away your intellect from imposing words, descriptions and conclusions, and try to suspend that logical and rational input, and just look.

When you can, close an eye because that will remove your stereo vision and depth perception that you may have been relying on to think there is a photograph, as it disappears the photograph can also disappear. Sometimes it can also help to just squint your eye a little bit, that throws your image out of focus for your eye and you are able to see the patterns of light and dark easier.