Recognize The Potential - Its All About Visual Context

 Adventure Photography does not necessarily suggest as a photographer you must travel across the country to find suitable subject matter. Doing so is certainly a plus, however by employing the element of evaluation to your local home range, you can discover and capture amazing photographs without ever having to travel outside your budget range. The trick is to recognize the potential of what you have available close to home and then deliver a finished photograph that captures the context of the moment.

I still have a number of bucket list items I hope to someday fulfill. I would love to spend a week during the fall at the Boundary Water Canoe Area, or hike into the Grand Canyon, or visit some of the amazing national parks I've not been able to get to yet. All are noble quests for anyone much less a photographer, but with travel costs what they are now days, well desiring to do those things and being able to afford doing them don't always coincide. Instead, I've started looking closer to home for opportunities. 

What I've discovered is just how easy it is to overlook the photographic potential of nearby locations. I've also started to understand how important it is to first recognize the potential of a given location by evaluating what it has to offer. The hard part is  conveying the visual context of the moment. Visual Context? Well, let me explain it this way. If I were to tell you I found an object and left it at that, you might think, 'Okay...so.' But, if I were to tell you I found it while walking on a volcanic sands beach and stepped on it barefoot, or while hiking in the mountains during a snow storm, well, now you have some visual context around the item that portrays it in a deeper meaning. In order to increase the impact of a photograph, it must have some visual context applied to it.

So how do you accomplish this? Much of the process is simply instinctive reactions combined with an element of common sense and observation. For example. Snap shots of a local lake are fine if all you desire is to make a simple record of an outing. They are the kind of photos you see all the time, nothing new or unusual about them. Capturing aesthetically pleasing photographs requires you to take your photographic efforts a good deal further down the road. For example, the photo on the left above is actually a pretty nice photo and it does have some context applied to it. You can deduce it was taken early at a lake and there was some driftwood along the edge. But, how did the photographer get there?

The photo on the right provides a good deal more context in that you can determine the moment was attained while paddling in a canoe across a calm lake on a foggy morning...Context. The first photo leaves the viewer with some mystery to contemplate from simple context, which is a good thing, while the other one generates a mysterious, and adventurous story line using more complete context.

Recognizing the potential of local photo ops takes some intuitive thinking to create context. Consider time of year and weather. What are the prevailing conditions during any given season? What is the potential for stormy weather, fog, wind, beautiful sunsets or sunrises, clear skies, clear and clean night skies, do you place the horizon high or low or across the middle in the composition, or maybe something entirely unexpected like a random encounter with wildlife. The idea then is to do some research and / or rely on past experience to set up a potential opportunity to discover what just might transpire photographically at a given location and then to apply an element of context to the moment by including subtle visual clues that show the viewer why this moment was important. Doing so interjects some of yourself into the photo.

Another part of the process, and the whole purpose of the exercise, is to be willing to be on location when the best light is available. Most of the time early or late in the day offers the best light potential, but it does not always require that. During the fall or winter, often overcast skies will create soft light that will cause the fall colors or the stark blend of winter contrasts, to resonate against the background. Middle of the day harsh lighting can be used to your advantage provided you find the best location to take advantage of it. Photograph the shadows, shoot the details of translucent light, isolate a single object against a dark background. The photo of the gull above shows the graceful flight of these amazing birds. The lines across the bottom half helps to provide some context as they are waves created by a passing boat.

It is those kinds of opportunities we too often overlook. Personally, I will shoot any time of day regardless of the lighting conditions. I just simply adjust my approach and look for the subjects that fit the conditions. Context is not always easy to apply, but there can be subtle visual clues. The star shaped flowers on the image to the right is surrounded by the context of dense foliage and soft shadowy light which generates the feeling of walking into a heavily wooded area. Context.

Recently, using my canoe to get there, I spent a few days camping on an isolated gravel beach at one of the local lakes. During the middle of the day, what surrounded me was rather ordinary snapshot type of opportunities. But, I began to look past what I was seeing in the middle part of the day, to recognize the potential of what might occur around dusk and then again before daylight. I call that approach "Visualizing beyond the ordinary". Things like fog, or subtle movement across the calm surface of a body of water, reflections, blurred movement, among many other elements help to provide context to the potential of a successful photo.

Camping on location gave me the advantage of being there when the light was at its best and as I suspected, this ordinary looking place offered up some rather nice photo ops when the light shifted into its best dressed moments. I simply allowed the moment to reveal itself contextually.

Recognizing the potential of a given location requires you to stop and think, then visualize beyond the ordinary, to see what could be, as opposed to what is, at a given moment. Context is difficult to convey. Sometimes you get it right, and sometimes you don't, but that is part of the learning process. When you get it right, the rewards often far out weigh the amount of effort it took to place yourself there.

Wind Blown - Three Days on Barren River Lake - Kentucky

 Canoe camping always presents a series of challenges and opportunities and over the course of three days near the end of September 2022, I faced challenges from nature that pushed my canoeing limits, yet discovered opportunities to capture some wonderful photographs.

The forecast was for winds 5 to 10 miles per hour for almost everyday that week. What I faced, especially on day one, were headwinds that kicked up white caps across the lake and made it nearly impossible to make forward progress in my canoe. Camper...my Old Town Canoe...is a venerable craft and I love it. It is especially good on flat water and quite adequate on flowing water, but the winds on the first day of my three day outing pushed old Camper to its limits and challenged my canoeing skills to near the breaking point. It's a discerning canoer who knows when to pull off the water because of the winds, and I very nearly did. 

Canoes are wonderful vessels, but limited in their ability to weather choppy waters. I stayed as close to the bank as I could as the winds tended to moderate some along the edges, but at times the very closeness to the ridge that rose from the waters edge tended to compress the winds causing them to intensify. There were times I literally was standing still as I flailed away with the paddle. The last quarter mile from my destination I almost turned back because I could not make any progress, but was able to slide over into a somewhat protected cove where the intensity of the wind dropped to about half. With one final effort I made landfall at the gravel beach I was to call home for the next couple of nights.

The winds were typical of the season, where each day early on it was quite still, almost calm, but by mid morning they started to kick in and by midday the blow was on and the blow lasted all afternoon almost until dusk when they moderated once again and stayed gentle through the evening. Fishing was pretty much out of the question as the wind made it impossible to fish from a canoe, but that was a secondary objective for this outing. My primary purpose was simply to get away and enjoy a few days out afield and to seek out photographically what Barren River Lake offered on this early Fall outing. I've always believed in order to capture the best possible light, you must place yourself in a position to do so. This particular time, I had to really work at it to get there, but the rewards were soon to reveal themselves as the fall colors were further along that expected this early in the season.

In spite of the wind, the weather was simply glorious. Bright blue sky, daytime highs in the low 70's and the night time lows fell all the way to as low as the upper 30's on the first night and the mid 40's on the second night. Using some paracord and a few whittled down sticks for supporting poles I pitched a makeshift tarp shelter a few yards from the waters edge. I had to do some excavating to create a flatten area upon which I could lay flat without feeling like I was going to roll down hill. Plenty of firewood lay scattered across the beach and inside the wooded area behind my campsite. 

By the time I had made camp, gathered firewood, and secured my gear, the time was closing in on dusk I managed to take some sundown photo's to close out the day. I'm always amazed at the myriad of colors the evening sky produces. Deep blues and violets, yellows, oranges, and reds dominate the atmosphere. Add a simple foreground object and the composition sets itself. Sometimes the evening sky is what is most important, but sometimes just a sliver of the sky is what is needed and reflections off the water become the most important

I spent that first evening relaxing around the campfire, but the day's struggle against the wind had taken its toll and by the time it was getting pretty dark, I called it a day and crawled into my sleeping bag to do some reading.  I've been re-reading an old classic true adventure book called A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins. It's somewhat of a dated book, but the adventure rings as true today as it did back in the early 1970's when it was written

Peter was a disillusioned young man from upper middle class Connecticut who became disgruntled with America and he felt like he truly did not understand or know what his country was all about. So he decided he'd find out by walking across it with his faithful dog Cooper. During his adventures he encounters all kinds of people, good and bad, weathers numerous storms and even almost dies from the flu, but in the end he rediscovers his country. In this first book, he travels down the Appalachia Trail starting in New York and works his way south to cross Georgia, Alabama, then arches into Tennessee, then eventually makes his way to New Orleans.  It's a great adventure. His second book titled The Walk West is where he heads west to eventually end up on the Pacific coast. I'll be reading that one again too...after I re-read another true adventure book titled "Dove". Dove is about a 16 year old boy who sails around the world solo back in the early to mid-60's. It is truly a grand adventure and I'm looking forward to re-reading it again.

That night I was able to do some night sky photography and captured several good images using an old stately but dead tree as a foreground object. It simply appeared to stretch toward the heavens.

The first morning came early enough and I was hoping there would be some fog on the lake. At first light, I crawled out of my sleeping bag, shivered in the morning chill, and was greeted by a wonderful ghostly fog that danced across the surface of the water. I quickly setup up the video camera and paddled into this apparition of the morning and managed to capture several photos, and video sequences. It could not have been much better. Along with this post, I will be posting a 15 minute Beyond the Campfire Adventure video which captures much of this unique morning...(Video).

Before the winds kicked up, I managed to paddle further up the lake about a mile or so just to see what was there, hoping to do some fishing, and maybe find another campsite. About the time I got there, the winds started in again and I was forced to turn around and head back to my original location.

 By the time I arrived the wind had cranked up into another blow creating a few whitecaps on the open water so I pulled out and spent some time exploring the woods behind that gravel beach.

The afternoon was warm, but windy, and as I inclined against a makeshift backrest, I heard some noise behind me. One of the fattest squirrels I've ever seen ran down the tree trunk and stopped about 8 feet or so from where I was. His coloring was unusual in that his back was graying, while his sides were red, and he had a white muzzle. He simply stared at me seemingly not knowing who or what I was.

 He never did appear spooked. I did not have my camera nearby, so I just watched him. When I stood to retrieve my camera, he scampered up the tree to hide on an elevated limb.

Most of the afternoon I simply relaxed and took several photos of the wooded area behind my site, and contemplated what I was going to do that evening and the next morning. I did manage to do some fishing off the bank and on one corner of this point that was my campsite where several large rocks extended into the water, I managed to catch three bass. Nothing of real consequence, but fun none-the-less. At least I did not get skunked.

I read well into the evening absorbed by the adventure that Peter experienced all those years ago. My heart tells me just how grand and amazing an adventure such as that would be, but that was a young man's adventure and what I was doing over these three days was more inclined to what my older self was capable of accomplishing. 

The next morning dawned bright and clear and even though there was a gentle breeze already kicking up, a light wispy fog hugged the surface of the lake and when the sun peaked over the top of the ridge, it set alight, stirred, and caused the thin layer of fog to dance across the surface. Once again I setup the video camera, and paddled into this most delightful of mornings. By the time I broke camp and stowed my gear in the bow of Camper, the morning was well on its way. It would take a couple of hours of steady paddling to return to the ramp where my ride was to catch up with me later on. At least I had a tail wind most of the way back and by the time I made it to the ramp, the wind was already driving other boaters off the lake.

Along the way I managed some fishing, but mostly I just contemplated just how amazingly beautiful this portion of the lake is. The fall colors were well on their way, even this early in the season, and the contrast of the yellows, greens, reds, and oranges against the brilliant blue sky became a fitting end to a very good and relaxing three days on the lake. 

Spider Webs: Nature's Perfection

 Not many things are more distracting than to received a face full of spider web while you are strolling through the woods. Almost invisible at times, it's easy to walk square into a thick coating of one that seems to cover your entire face. What's worse is when it gets in your mouth. More often than not, I will pick up a short stick and wave it in a circular motion in front of me as I take a woodland stroll as this will effectively eliminate those unseen creations of nature. I must look ridiculous doing that, but hey, it works.  Oddly enough, on those days when I have my camera in hand and nothing is happening photographically, spider webs often provide an amazing photographic resource.

Stronger than a steel strand of the same diameter, spider webs are produced from a liquid inside the spider that is made up of proteins that somehow generate a silky substance that is either fed from the spiders abdomen via gravity as the spider swings across an opening or is simply pulled from the spider by its legs. Regardless of how it is extracted, spider webs are some of the most perfectly and intricately formed creations of nature thus providing the photographer with an amazing opportunity to capture something that is truly unique in the world.

In order to photograph a spider web effectively, the light needs to be just right, usually coming from a low angle that back lights the strands. A dark background is also necessary so the strands have something to stand out against. I don't always try to photograph the entire web. Sometimes I concentrate on just a portion of one when the design elements stand out. The background lighting will also make for an interesting composition so always keep that in mind as you frame the image. Also remember it is best to focus on the web as straight on as possible because the depth of field issue will sometimes make part of the composition out of focus. Don't be afraid to crop the image either. Just a single area can be the most interesting part of the web.

The best time is early of morning when the light is angled low and more often than not the morning dew has settled on the web. This really creates a wonderful contrast and the dew often looks like a string of suspended diamonds. If dew is not heavy enough, you can simulate its effects by using a small spray bottle and simply giving it a couple of squirts, or in a pinch if you have a water bottle, take a small mouth full and with pressed lips, blow it out in a fine spray.

Spider webs offer a unique and fun subject matter. They are truly one of natures most perfectly designed creations. I'm always fascinated by their delicate yet strong engineering design.