The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression

Note

When you encounter a scene that grabs you, it is imperative that you respond instantly and spontaneously to that impulse. That doesn’t mean you instantly shoot the scene, but that you immediately investigate it.

Because camera position is so important, I have developed a method of searching for the right location and placing my tripod with real precision. When I feel that a scene is worthwhile, I carefully look at it from numerous possible camera positions—an inch or two forward, up and to the right, back and down, etc.—until I find the best possible location for the camera. All this is done with my camera in its case and my tripod in hand. As soon as I determine the best position, I hold the tripod head at my chin and drop its legs down to the ground. When the camera is placed on the tripod, it will be just where my eye was. All too often I see photographers put their cameras on tripods and then search for the best location. That approach does not work as well.

Focal Length of Lens and Cropping

Camera position must be considered in conjunction with the focal length of the lens used to expose the photograph. Together, the two determine the perspective of the image.

Long focal length lenses (telephoto or similar lenses) tend to compress space, crowding objects together that may be separated in reality. Short focal length lenses (wide-angle lenses) tend to exaggerate space, separating objects that may be close together in reality. Clever use of these effects can produce exciting images that most people may never see in reality. The choice of lens, along with the type of lighting that either exists naturally or that you create artificially can dramatically alter the spatial characteristics of a scene.

If all lenses were infinitely sharp and films were grainless, or if there were an infinite number of pixels on camera sensors, we could easily get by with one wide-angle lens and just crop to the image we really want! That would give us plenty of time to comfortably determine how to approach every image. Unfortunately, we do not have that luxury, so we must burden ourselves with heavy equipment and make decisions on the spot. A key question is this: what should be included in the image, and what should be excluded? Once your decision is made, use the lens that includes what you want, and little, if any, excess.

Note

I always try to compose full frame, but I recognize that doesn’t always work. If I feel an image can be improved by cropping any portion of it, I don’t hesitate to crop.

What about the excess? My approach is to always try to compose full frame, but also to recognize that that doesn’t always work. If I feel an image can be improved by cropping (i.e., removing) any portion of it, I don’t hesitate. Sometimes the best image lies between focal lengths of lenses that I am carrying; in that case I use the shorter lens, which includes all of the pertinent imagery plus some excess, then remove the excess. My next longer lens might eliminate an important element of the image.

Sometimes my camera format is wrong for the image: I may find a long, narrow image of real interest within a 4 × 5 format, or a square image of great power within a 35mm format. In either case, there is no reason to include the whole image when a portion of it is considerably stronger. There is no reason to be a slave to any particular camera format. God did not create the world in 35mm format, or 2¼ format, or 4 × 5 format! Sometimes after composing full frame, I may discover later that a far stronger image lies within a particular portion of the frame. In such cases, I crop. No problem. It’s legal.

Some photographers always feel compelled to present full frame images. If you can compose full frame as powerfully and as often as Cartier-Bresson did, then do it! But I don’t advise it. Suppose, for example, that you find a camera position that creates a magical relationship between a foreground and a background object, but it includes some major or minor distraction (or even useless, excess information) along one edge. If you print full frame, you get the great relationship, but you’re stuck with the junk on the edge. If you move the camera just a bit, you may be able to eliminate the junk, but the primary relationship isn’t as compelling. What do you do? I advise you to shoot from the best position and crop rather than compromise by either including the distraction or losing the compelling relationship. Remember Edward Weston’s statement, “Good composition is the strongest way of seeing.” An insistence on shooting full frame images may compromise that strength.

Depth of Field

Depth of field and shutter speed (to be discussed next) are the two elements of composition unique to photography. (Camera position is somewhat analogous to a painter choosing a “viewer’s position” for a painting.) A photographer has the option of bringing virtually everything into sharp focus by closing down the lens to its minimum aperture (i.e., f/22, f/32, f/45, etc.); or, of limiting sharp focus to one plane by opening up the lens to its maximum aperture (i.e., f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, etc.) and allowing objects in front of the plane and behind it to fade out of focus. I rarely resort to limited depth of field, though I have on rare occasions (Figure 3-15). In general, I tend to prefer imagery that allows the viewer to peruse the scene and get information out of every part of it, but I don’t make a rule of that. Limited depth of field can be employed brilliantly.

A lens focuses the image at a fixed distance from the camera, somewhere between the closest possible plane of focus and infinity. By closing down the aperture, you have the option of bringing more than the initial plane of focus into true sharpness. (At maximum aperture, sharpness falls off rapidly in front of and behind the plane of focus.) If you want to attain sharpness throughout the image, and the scene includes objects relatively close to the camera as well as quite far away, it is best to focus approximately of the distance from the closest object to the farthest one. This is known as the hyperfocal distance. Then close down the aperture to the minimum opening. As the aperture closes down from its maximum setting, sharpness increases both in front of the plane of focus and behind it, but not equally. Depth of field (i.e., sharpness in front of and behind the initial plane of focus) increases from the original plane of focus roughly half as fast toward the camera as it increases away from the camera. That explains the reason for initially focusing of the way into the scene.

If you focus on the farthest object and then close the aperture, you gain no benefit from increased sharpness behind the farthest object because there are no more distant objects! If you focus on the closest object and close the aperture, you gain no benefit from increased sharpness in front of that object because there is nothing in front of that object, either! By focusing on a plane approximately of the distance between the two, you may be able to get all objects into sharp focus as you close the aperture down toward the minimum setting.

There are limits to increased sharpness with smaller apertures. As apertures get progressively smaller, diffraction sets in. Diffraction is the bending of light waves due to the small aperture, which makes the sharpest possible focus progressively less sharp (even at the initial plane of focus) as apertures decrease. At some very small apertures, nothing is really sharp while your depth of field increases... or, to put it another way, everything is “almost sharp” but not truly sharp. This is an especially vexing problem with digital cameras; diffraction interacts with digital sensors in ways that can decrease overall sharpness so much that everything becomes quite unsharp at small apertures. It’s important to understand how your equipment works—and how each lens responds—at small aperture settings.