Thursday, May 03, 2007

There's An Image Round The Next Corner

It's all to easy for us to get a bit neurotic about getting a great image and finding nothing great to photograph. While you could 'work' the scene harder in the belief that it's there, you only need to find it, but perhaps it's more productive to admit that while there may be an image here, it isn't here, today, and it's time to move on. A frequent occurrence is to come home with a good shot that has nothing to do with what you went out to take, that the spot you anticipated would work well doesn't, but 10 minutes later you stumble on something really good.

Some photographers will wait for hours for the right light, others move on in the hope that the time they could have spent sitting for the right circumstances is better spent looking for another image.

I guess if you know this is going to be a fabulous image if the light is right, it's worth waiting just about any amount of time. If you think it might be a good image if you wait, then it's perhaps better to cut and run.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think that the good images come about when you wait without expectation of the outcome. When I go out to shoot, I intend to take a few good images; however, I'm not really attached to that outcome. If it happens, it does, if not, well, it doesn't. I cannot make it happen.

A lot of times what happens is that it comes in most unexpected ways, which is always delightful. One day I went out to shoot trees, leaves, stumps, etc. and was finding nothing. As I made my way down a trail, I almost literally ran into an owl that was very near the edge of the trail. He flew into a nearby tree and I let loose with the shots. I got some pretty nice ones. I had intended to get good shots and I did, but not what I expected. :-)

Mark said...

I had wrote something similar recently in my blog on 'choosing your battles wisely.' The process that we go through in deciding how much time to spend on a certain subject before moving on. I think it is a decision every one of us face with every trip of the shutter.