Nature's Best :: Don Smith Photography
Exploring our incredible world one image at a time!
Do You Look Or Do You See? Developing Your Creative Vision :: Part 2 of 3
Back-lit Elm, Cooks Meadow, Yosemite National Park
Canon 1DsMKIII, Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM Lens, f/22, 1/10th, ISO 100, Lexar Digital Media
This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on developing your creative vision. You can find Part 1 of this series by clicking here.
My path to becoming a full-time landscape photographer has been long a varied. If you read PART 1 of this series, then you know I started photographing landscapes back in my teenage years. You’ll also come away with an understanding that to become a really good photographer, you have to learn your craft and constantly work to improve your creative vision.
Once I turned professional, my landscape work took a backseat to my full-time pursuit of professional sports photography. I never stopped mind you, it was just not the way I made my living. I did that by photographing America’s pro sports: MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL. Of the four, I still shoot the NHL as co-team photographer for the San Jose Sharks.
This meant lots of travel. My way of relaxing while on the road back then was to actually go out in my off-time and photograph landscapes all over the United States. By my count, I’ve photographed in 48 of our 50 states. Pretty cool!
What it also allowed me to do, was to develop my creative eye for fine art landscape photography without the pressure of having to succeed at it financially to feed my family. Not that sports photography wasn’t creative, but it just involved a completely different mindset.
Passion is what drives me. I was just born to do what I am doing, and believe me, I fought the idea for years! When I finally gave into the fact that this is who I am and this is what I do, then my life really changed (perhaps the old “sink-or-swim” theory kicked in)! One truism: when you dedicate your life to being an artist (in any genre), you will live with a certain amount of financial uncertainty.
Passion is what drives me. I was just born to do what I am doing, and believe me, I fought the idea for years! When I finally gave into the fact that this is who I am and this is what I do, then my life really changed (perhaps the old “sink-or-swim” theory kicked in)!
I never bought in to that old “starving artist” theory, so I made money with my camera shooting commercial work along with sports. Granted there were some jobs I really didn’t want to do, but they helped pay the bills. My dad was self-employed and I learned a lot by watching how he and my mom navigated his business. Hard work and treating people right being at the top of the list.
Looking back, there could have been some really lean years early on. But I was so blessed to have my wife Beri’s love and support – she is still there for me every day – she accepted me and what I do for a living and didn’t try to change me. She also told me that she would work full-time, which in-turn allowed me to grow my business at a steady pace without having to be the main bread-winner.
That freed my mind up to really concentrate on becoming the best photographer that I could be, and I still do it every day of my life. I made a commitment to work at both my craft and creative vision as hard as I could.
Take Time To Develop Your Vision :: It Does Not Happen Overnight
Ten years ago, Beri and I decided to make a go of my landscape photography. That’s another story for another day, but suffice it to say we are still working at it – step-by-step, day-by-day. It’s not an easy path to follow.
In my previous blog, I broke my photography into two parts: Craft (camera / processing) and Vision. I said that if you worked hard at your craft, you could learn it in a year. But that is working every day – most of you don’t have that luxury, so give yourself a bit more time.
Learning the camera is pretty straightforward. Post-processing gets a bit trickier and is really personal. We all read images differently and our processing is a personal statement about the scene that we are presenting. Post-processing in and of itself is a very creative activity.
I can help shortcut you through the process with my new video series: A Simplified Method to Workflow. I show you step-by-step how I process and work you through setting up your computer, processing RAW files and finishing off in Photoshop. I even show luminosity masking, using Tony Kuyper’s luminosity mask action palette. Learn this last step and you can re-create any scene you photographed as you intend (you’ll throw away your HDR programs – guaranteed)! Tony has great tutoriols on his site and I go over the basics in my video series.
So, that brings us to what I consider the most critical part of photography – developing your creative vision. If the craft part can be accomplished in a year or two, then you may be dismayed to hear that vision takes years and years. Really mature vision does not happen quickly – it really is a culmination of all of your life-experiences. You’ll never stop learning how to see, but through the transformation, you’ll stop merely looking. The scene in front of you will become a starting point only for your creativity.
The really cool part is that you’ll start seeing the potential for images everywhere you go! Exotic locations are awesome, but when you make the leap to really seeing, your everyday surroundings can be mined for nuggets!
For me, it started with a serious study of composition, light, art (color and depth), and design. Let’s take a closer look at all four and see how we can tie them together to help your creative vision. For this article, I will discuss my thoughts on composition and light. In Part 3, I’ll discuss the importance of art and design.
The Study Of Composition
The foundation of any good image is a strong composition. If you have a scatter-shot approach to your photography, perhaps you should re-think how you work. Fine Art landscape photography for me was just the opposite of my sports photography work.
I made my living with sports primarily because I loved the sports I was photographing, understood them almost as well as the coaches and players, and I was blessed with really good hand/eye coordination. I worked part-time for Sports Illustrated and started before autofocus lenses were a reality. That meant manual focus on fast-moving subjects with 400mm and 600mm glass. One could either do it or not. Somehow I was born with this talent. I went on to become team co-team photographer for the NHL’s San Jose Sharks (still am today).
San Jose Sharks Tomas Hertl scores a goal on a shot fired between his legs and over the shoulder of New York Ranger goalie Martin Biron
October 8, 2013, SAP Center, San Jose, California
Canon 1DX, Canon EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM Lens, f/7.1/ 1/250th sync, ISO 200, PocketWizard MultiMax 32 Channel Transceiver Radio Slave, (8) Speedotron 2401SX 2400 Ws Power Supply (120VAC) and Speedotron 105 CC UV Quad-Tube Lamphead (220/240VAC), Lexar Digital Media
It means quick timing and and even quicker movements – pro hockey players move really fast! I’m at my best when I can find my zone (similar to the athletes). Once I get there, it seems as if everything goes into slow motion. Can’t explain this one either other than to say I go into a very deep concentration and block everything else out. It took me years to learn how to do this. I had to become emotionally unattached; in other words, when I am photographing a game, even if it involves my beloved Sharks, I cannot allow myself to become a fan, I am strictly a photographer and the players are my subject.
Once the emotion is gone, then I can really begin to concentrate on what I am doing. I try my hardest to focus my mind on what I am seeing through my camera. Anticipation is key, and staying as relaxed as possible is essential. If I’m tense, I can’t react – I’ll be a fraction off and that will be enough to cause me to miss the shot.
Pro athletes talk all the time about staying on an even keel. Former Shark, Torrey Mitchell, once told me and my sons that the Shark players had a rule: if they won, they got up for 5 minutes then came back to even; if they lost, they allowed themselves to get down for 5 minutes then had to get right back to even. Great advice for not only photography, but also life! In other words, being too high or too low messes with your ability to really see and concentrate. Try to stay as even keel as possible and you will be at your best to really tune-in to your subject.
When I go out to shoot landscapes, concentration and finding the zone are still key for me. But I am not rushing. It took me years to learn how to slow down (that was not part of my makeup when I was younger, but getting older is actually helping in that regard). Being on a tripod is key, but I don’t start there – I start with my camera off my tripod so I am more free to move around. Only when I find my composition do I bring in the sticks.
Moreover, I have to have an emotional connection to what I am photographing. I call this “paying attention to my emotional tugs.” When I am really in the zone, and really seeing well, then I have opened myself up to allowing these emotional tugs to communicate with me. I tend to make my best images when I am alone and really into this process; it’s nearly impossible to get there while I am teaching a workshop because my main goal is not my photography; rather, it’s helping my students with their photography. I take my camera along because it helps me see as a photographer and allows me to call out potential scenes to my participants.
I’m not big on compositional rules and theory. I keep it simple. In my mind, I assign visual weight to all the elements in my scene. I envision my composition sitting on a fulcrum point. I want the composition to feel balanced. If I add an element to the right of center, I try to counter-balance by adding an element to the left-of-center. It’s a feel thing and hard to put in to words, but I trust my inner sense of visual balance, you need to do the same. If the scene feels unbalanced, then study the composition and try to figure out why. It’s kind of like completing a puzzle, but only you can get the pieces to fit right.
I really enjoy this challenge and find it fun to work through each composition. Of course, when the light is rapidly changing, the whole process has to get kicked into high gear; yet, this can be mitigated by anticipating the light and finding your composition prior to the good light arriving.
Salsify Against Sunset Light
Canon 5DMKIII, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM Lens, f/5.6, 1/80th sec., ISO 400, Lexar Digital Media
Of course balance is just one part of composition, depth, or at least creating the illusion of depth, is another and one I will discuss more in-depth (pardon the pun) when we look at the study of art in Part 3.
But finding a good composition is only the starting point. Next, and perhaps more important, is finding the right light.
Finding The Light
It is no big secret that most fine art landscape photographers like working around the fringes of the day. Why? Because that is when the light is most interesting. That’s not to say you can’t find good quality light during the day, but I live in California, where 6 months out of the year we have blank-blue skies. Great for taking Chamber-of-Commerce images, but not fine art landscape images.
So that means getting up in the dark to be on-location 45 minutes prior to sunrise to photograph dawn light, and also staying well beyond sunset to chase dusk light.
In the image of the back-lit elm that starts off this article, I actually had to wait for the sun to crest Yosemite Valley’s Cooks Meadow. It was easy to see where the sun was going to rise and the unexpected bonus was the rising mist coming off the Valley floor. As soon as the sun crested, the elm tree exploded into vivid backlit yellows and the warm foreground grasses came to life!
Prior to the sun rising, this scene was pretty, but the light was boring. It allowed me time to think through my composition, at least a starting composition. Once the light arrived, I fine-tuned my composition (in this case, I moved the camera lower to the ground to emphasize the warm foreground grasses), which I could not see nor anticipate prior to the sun cresting.
The macro image of the salsify above was captured near sunset. I simply setup my camera, composed the shot, then waited for the sun to lower and warm the salsify. My earlier attempts were technically correct, but it was the warm light that gave this image its soul.
As the sun rises or sets, the light becomes warmer due to light-scattering. It has to do with the way light wavelengths are transmitted and I could bore you to death with it but I won’t. Suffice it to say, the cool rays of the spectrum are scattered allowing just the warm light to pass through. The light is directional and warm and fleeting, so be prepared.
Below you see an image of dancing sunflowers. I was out an hour before sunset attempting to freeze these sunflowers with a 300mm lens. Mother Nature had other ideas and decided to add a 25mph wind. As the sun lowered to camera-left and warmed the scene, I gave into my frustrations of trying to freeze the flowers and instead, allowed them to dance and paint themselves onto my camera’s sensor (as the tag line for the old commercial used to say, “you can’t fight Mother Nature).”
Dancing Sunflowers
Canon 5DMKIII, Canon EF 300mm f/4L IS USM Lens, f/5.6, 1/80th sec., ISO 400, Singh-Ray 77mm LB ColorCombo Polarizer Thin Mount Filter, Lexar Digital Media
Again, without the quality of the low-angled sunlight, this scene would have recorded too cold and uninteresting IMO, and earlier frames bore that out.
Please come back for Part 3, where I will explore the importance of studying art (color/depth) and design and show examples of how both can aide in improving your creative vision.
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Nature's Best :: Don Smith Photography 
You conveyed wonderful how you work through the creative process. Thank you! By the way you somehow also managed to create 2 new states. 🙂
Thanks Eliot – my proofreader is on vacation 🙂
Great writing, thanks for sharing it! It is inspiring and very encouraging!!
Thanks Andres!
Exceptional shot Don!