Mistakes, second chances, and things forgotten (part three)

This is the final part of a three part series on learning from mistakes in photography. You can see part one, here, and part two, here.

For this final part, we look at things forgotten. 

1) Highlighting the light

The story is right there in the root of the word itself: photography – light writing. Yet it’s often easy to forget in a world packed with heaps of interesting subject matter, just how powerful light is as a tool in the practice of photography.

Indeed, some of the most compelling photographs take light itself as the primary subject of the composition.

Just going out shooting with this principle in mind can be a transformative exercise. Try looking at your subject matter not as itself, but as a vehicle and setting for illumination.

This approach can lend itself to various ends: to the creation of a mood, to the heightening of a particular point of focus, and to beautiful abstractions of light and shadow.

As a corollary, it’s worth keeping this principle in mind during post-processing, too. While it can be tempting to ‘flatten’ an image by bringing up all the shadows and dragging down all the highlights, doing so can also work to murder the drama in a scene.

2) Using motion creatively

Like light, motion represents one of the most creative tools available in the photographer’s repertoire. The way that motion can be fixed or blurred by a photograph may represent a distortion of our perception of the physical world, but it’s a falsification that can ring with a surprising sense of truth.

I shoot in Aperture Priority mode 90% of the time, knowing that the camera is generally much smarter than I am, and that my main concern is ensuring the appropriate setting for the desired depth of field.

The exception to this rule is a situation where I know I want motion in the image to be either frozen, or smeared through the flow of time.

And just as the distortions of impressionist painting technique revealed what is, in many ways, a way of seeing the world that feels truer than real life, so too can we use distorted motion to reveal a kind of perceptual truth.  

Freezing motion with a fast shutter speed (think 1/200th of a second or faster) is incredibly easy in good lighting conditions, and is an especially pleasing effect with falling water, or anywhere else where things are generally moving too fast for the naked eye to see.

At the other end of the spectrum, getting a good motion blur is trickier. You can always use a tripod to ensure a stock-still exposure, but much of the time I just rely on how good image stabilisation – either in-lens or in-body – has become.

With good technique and decent stabilisation, handheld shutter speeds of 1/10th to 1/3rd of a second work great to blur motion in many subjects, and will result in an image where everything is sharp except what’s moving. 

3) Creating your own shot

Physically manipulating your environment to enhance an image is an underrated and often forgotten technique. The first time I did it I felt like I was breaking some kind of rule. Would a hand reach down from the clouds and strike me, I wondered, for intentionally placing things in an image?

Yet a moment after I’d pressed the shutter, no such retribution came, and when I looked at the image on my monitor later it looked great. Just how I’d imagined it would.

Maybe don’t think of it as cheating, then. Think of it as ‘imaginative photography’. Would placing a pop of colour in the frame create an ideal point of focus, or make the image come alive?

Would a bit of smoke or dust be the perfect medium to catch the light? Do you have a friend with you who, posed just so, would make the landscape or streetscape you’re looking at absolutely perfect? Do it, I say.

Authenticity in photographs is a contentious topic, and is only becoming more so in the era of digital manipulation and AI.

With that said, however, if you’re not telling untruths about your images – and especially if you’re just playing around in good old-fashioned three dimensional reality – I sincerely believe that creating your own shot should be encouraged. ❂