Simplicity

I have written before about complex pictures being a 'hard sell'. I'm just back from photographing the badlands and I am dissapointed with a number of images I had thought would work, and consistently it's a problem of being too complex.

I'm going to go further and say that the primary problem of most failed photographs is a matter of not keeping things simple enough, of not being tidy, of not eliminating things which even if not downright distracting, don't actually add to the composition.

It's tempting to use cropping as a way to solve this problem, but what actually happens in many cases is you 'throw out the baby with the bathwater', that is, you remove some of the good parts of the image in a desparate attempt to remove the distracting elements, ending up with a weaker message rather than one spoiled by distractions - not a great tradeoff.

Truth is, some times you can find something lovely to photograph but no matter how you cut it, you can't find a way to eliminate the distracting, extraneous, surplus to requirement elements and it just doesn't work.

Other times, there are too many good things and it's tempting to include them all, yet even though they are interesting shapes, lovely tones, and well deserving of capture, put together they don't form a harmonious whole and yet again a weak image is the result. One must be as vigilant to not add something which doesn't contribute to the whole as one watches to be sure no distracting elements persist. Our work is cut out for us.