Being in the Moment: Finding the Right Place to Stand

 Many factors influence what makes a great photograph, choosing where to stand certainly counts as one of if not the most important. It sounds so basic, yet is perhaps one of the most overlooked and encompassing of all the factors because it transcends routine 'raise the camera and shoot' techniques and requires the photographer to make a discerning decision.

A wrong or indifferent perspective can cause a potentially great photograph to look ordinary and subpar. The best perspective can be something as simple as moving a few inches to the right or left, or kneeling down to ground level, or standing on the bumper of your car to get a little higher. It can also become as demanding as hiking across a damp field of waist high weeds, or climbing to the top of a ridge, or wading out into the middle of a stream, or lying down in a muddy field. Finding the right place to stand is the first foundational element of capturing a great photograph.

Other elements come into play as well. Time of day, lighting conditions or waiting for the light to shift, sun angles, season, weather, type of lens, exposure values, all of these and more serve as supporting elements from where to begin which is deciding where to stand. 

Before snapping the shutter, the first thing I do is to look at the edges of the frame. Is what is there necessary for the success of the photo? Are there distractions? If I move to the right or left or up or down or will swapping out my lense improve the framing...what about walking to the other side of the field? Will doing so improve the perspective?

Making a decision on where to stand comes with experience and eventually becomes instinctive. Always shooting from eye level and/or being unwilling to move around to make the required effort to discover the best perspective is a recipe of the ordinary. 

 Before long, you begin to more clearly see the elements of a scene and determine what is important and what is not. Observing what is there and then determining if what is there is required for the image you see in your mind is what helps develop the ability to visualize the shot before you take it. You saw something that caught your interest, but in every situation there are distracting and unnecessary elements. Fine tuning those initial visual evaluations by making the effort to find the right place to stand will refine and improve the final results.

 

The image on the left is one such photo. Taken at sunrise on a blustery late-fall day, this gravel road led to a rustic farmhouse nestled amongst a grove of trees. The main road ran perpendicular to this gravel road, but from the intersection of the two, the perspective was not right. Too much road to work with, and too far away from the main subject, so instead I walked a couple hundred yards or so down the road and stopped at the base of a shallow rise that rolled over and dipped a few yards on the other side. Fence posts lined the sides and cornstubble filled the pastures on either side. I tried a low down perspective which did not work; it flattened out the road too much. I looked at the framing from eye level which was not quite right, so I raised the tripod neck as high as it would go which gave me a few more inches higher than my eye level. It was just enough to capture the hump and dip and include the length of the old road as it flowed into the scene. Shifting to the right just a little, allowed the first fence post on the right to come into view which helped frame the scene. The rest was simply to wait on the light and set the correct exposure. Finding the right place to stand is what made this image work.

Being in the moment and finding the right place to stand is what separates an informed photographer with a trained eye, from an average picture taker. Not unlike a structure needing a strong foundation on which to be built, a great photograph requires a strong foundation as well, and that begins with knowing where to stand.