On Looking For Photographs

I had written earlier about the process of deciding where to go to photograph, and when. I want to see if I can write something useful about the process of looking for something to photograph when you have already arrived.

Sometimes it's obvious, there's only one thing to photograph and I will discuss the process of doing so to best advantage towards the end of this article but what if it isn't obvious what to photograph.

Perhaps the best possibility is to illustrate with an example.

Last year I was at a Family Practice conference and typical of my style I attend lectures faithfully every morning and take off the afternoon to go photographing. As this was February, it meant missing the morning light but I'd been able to find interesting subjects at previous conferences (always held in Banff).

I had heard that a walk along an abandoned road for 4k would take me to the base of Sundance Canyon. It was on my 'must go there one of these days' list and so I headed off. The canyon walls are only 40 feet or so high, Grand Canyon it isn't, but I'd hiked 4km to get here and I wasn't about to leave without checking it out. Half the canyon was in brilliant afternoon sun. The shadows were deep and relatively short and it didn't look like I could do much with it. Colours were muted. Even the most interesting coloured rock photographs poorly at mid day in bright sun. The other side of the canyon however was more interesting. Lit by the bright other side, the light wasn't totally flat and the wall had interesting characteristics. I took several compositions as I worked my way up the canyon.

Half way up the canyon I came across the most amazing find. There was an incredibly coloured rock, white, red, pink, streaked, and in interesting patterns. Better yet a second rock sat in front of the first - perhaps the two could be combined somehow. The ultimate though was that in front of the whitish second rock was a wild rose covered in rose hips.

I just knew I had to combine the three. Depth of field would be a problem but perhaps if the background was a little blurred it wouldn't matter - I'd do the best I could and see.

I thought that if I used a wide angle I could move in really close to the rose and use the two rocks as background but no matter how I positioned myself, the background included too much - the nature of wide angle lenses. I tried several different focal lengths, finally settling on my 70-200 zoom, at 91 mm. at f32 (I have subsequently learned that no additional sharpness in any part of the image is obtained at f32 and you lose sharpness in the part of the image which was originally focused on - f16 is now my max. f stop with my full frame 1Ds2 - no matter what.


It took some effort, perhaps 20 minutes or more, even once I found the right lens, to move back and forth and find the one position left and right, up and down, two and fro that would record the image - no other position worked as well.

After finishing the rose rock combo, I continued to climb up and photographed a few more 'interesting' rocks which were all a letdown after this shot and I also made a few nice tourist brochure images which I don't particularly like but have sold ok.

The image 'sundance rose' did require substantial work to get it looking good. It wasn't super sharp (see above) but I have found that diffraction fuzziness does respond fairly well to smart sharpen in photoshop and I am able to make great 17X22 images and have even made a good 24X32 image.

Next time I will get back to my intention to discuss the process of what to do when you find something interesting to photograph.