01-26-16

Day 26 / 391 –

This is a bad photo.

Strange, right?  That I would post a bad photo, but here it is, a bad photo.  Not one I’m proud of.  And you might be saying, that isn’t so bad.  It has some interesting things to look at, it has some contrast, etc.  But really, it is a bad photo.

I want to talk about what makes it bad.  The reason it’s bad is because there is too much going on to clearly say why I took this picture, why I stopped here and wanted to snap this.  Too busy.  Cluttered.

Can you see the reason I took this picture in the first place?  Take a look at the roof.  Did you see it before I pointed it out?  Does anything in the photo lead you there, or make it stand out?  Maybe your eyes went to the trees first.  Or you looked at the walls of the house rather than the roof.  I’m the one who made the photo and I don’t look at the roof, which was the whole point of the photo when I shot it.

Black and white is an interesting beast.  It forces you to clarify what you are doing.  It makes you think about what you put in the image and what you leave out.  You are better off leaving out things, rather than adding more.  You do this by moving around, reframing, making compositional choices.

With color photography, it’s easy to enjoy the colors without really seeing what the image is actually of.  Yesterday’s shot is a good example.  The warm colors can be a contrast to the parts of the shack that are falling down, but they can distract.   Another might be this.  The colors are pretty, and the building is amazing.  I really love this shot, but what are we really looking at?  The colors?  The sky?  There is nothing wrong with making an image that is colorful and vibrant.  I just prefer that those images convey what I was feeling about what I was seeing.  I think the building does that better than the shack from yesterday, but they can both get pulled down by the brilliance of the colors.

For today’s shot, I might be able to come back at a different time of day and get more light on the roof, taking away from the shadows of the tree behind it.  Since it’s winter and the tree is to the south, I probably would need to be here in the summer.  That isn’t going to happen.  Maybe the right filter, or right effects.  I don’t know yet.

It’s good to take stinkers of photos sometimes.  If you dig in to what doesn’t work about a bad image, you can figure out what you can do better next time.  You might look at a potential photo and decide to move on, saving you an hour of trying to make something work that simply won’t.  Perhaps in the hands of someone else more skilled, they could pull out what I was going for.  I might work on this photo more to see what comes of it.  Trying to pull wine from a stone can sometimes lead to interesting new techniques and skills.

But I wanted to put this up to say that things don’t always work out.  Sometimes, the most interesting view of a falling down house doesn’t compare to the simplicity of a cow looking off in the distance.  Knowing why that is the case helps tremendously.

Bad photos can be more useful than good ones sometimes.