Composition
by Michael Frye | Dec 17, 2015 | Composition, Vision and Creativity
Reflections along the Merced River, winter, Yosemite. I tried several different versions of this photograph. I initially wanted to include a wider view, with more trees on the sides, but a distracting log just out of the frame on the right bothered me. In the end I liked this tighter, simpler, distraction-free version better.
Yosemite Valley received two doses of snow this past weekend, first on Friday night, and then again on Sunday night. I wasn’t able to make it up there on Saturday, but Claudia and I drove up early Monday morning after the second snowfall.
The storm had cleared around midnight, and temperatures then dropped down to 25 degrees. Below-freezing temperatures inhibit the development of fog and mist, so the skies were clear when we arrived in the valley. But we found three to four inches of fresh, fluffy snow coating all the trees.
(more…)
by Michael Frye | Aug 2, 2015 | Composition
Sunbeams in a redwood forest, northern California coast, USA
When doing critiques I often encounter otherwise-wonderful images, with simple, strong compositions, great light, and nice color, but lacking an essential ingredient: a focal point. Viewers need something to latch onto, and if they don’t find it right away they feel lost. You have to take them by the hand and say, “Here, look at this.”
The photograph above has an obvious focal point — the sun. From there your eyes can travel along the radiating light beams out to the rest of the frame.
(more…)
by Michael Frye | Jul 6, 2015 | Composition, Light and Weather
Half Dome from Glacier Point, late afternoon, Yosemite; for a brief moment the clouds formed a zigzag pattern above Half Dome.
Last week I mentioned that the weather forecast called for monsoonal moisture to move up into the Sierra Nevada from the south, with possible showers and thunderstorms. And sure enough, things unfolded pretty much as predicted. Rain was very localized; we got sprinkled on a couple of times at our house in Mariposa, but other nearby areas got dumped on when they received a direct hit from a thunderstorm.
Wednesday night brought thunder to the foothills near our house – that’s when I made the lightning photograph from my last post. But we saw interesting clouds all week. Claudia and I made two trips to Glacier Point, and I also photographed some beautiful moonlit clouds from our driveway, and made a trip into the lower foothills, where I found some striking, colorful sunbeams.
What do all these photographs have in common – aside from clouds? Patterns. All of these images have some kind of repeating pattern or design in the clouds.
(more…)
by Michael Frye | May 14, 2015 | Composition
Rainbow over Negit Island, Mono Lake, California. Although I made other compositions of this scene with longer lenses, I liked the slightly wider perspective created by a normal 50mm lens, because it allowed me to include some of the blue sky.
The “normal” lens doesn’t get much love. Longer and shorter focal lengths seem more attractive, because they create unusual perspectives. As I wrote in this recent post, wide-angle lenses stretch space and make things look farther apart, sometimes creating a sense of depth, while telephoto lenses compress space and makes objects look closer together, helping to emphasize patterns and juxtapositions.
I, too, was guilty of disdain for the normal lens for many years. Although I used normal lenses (around 50mm for full-frame cameras, or about 35mm for APS-size sensors) for two decades with my film cameras, for a ten-year stretch the only lenses I used with my Canon DSLRs were 17-40mm and 70-200mm zooms. I never felt the need to fill the gap between 40mm and 70mm because I usually wanted to go either wide or long. On the rare occasions when I needed a focal length between 40mm and 70mm, I used 40mm and cropped.
(more…)
by Michael Frye | Apr 24, 2015 | Composition
Peaks and curves
Claudia and I just finished a night photography workshop in Death Valley and the Trona Pinnacles with our good friend and assistant Robert Eckhardt. It was so much fun, with a great group of people in some wonderful places.
We made plenty of nighttime photographs of course, but we also got to spend two mornings in the Mesquite Flat dunes in Death Valley, once while scouting before the workshop, and the second time with the group. Both of these visits followed big wind storms the day before, and the dunes were pristine, with no footprints.
(more…)
by Michael Frye | Apr 16, 2015 | Composition
Blue oaks in fog 2, Sierra Nevada foothills
Ansel Adams was quoted as saying, “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” I’m sure he said this with tongue slightly in cheek – he knew full well that the art of photography was more complex than that. But he was trying to emphasize the importance of putting the camera in the right spot. Not just in the general vicinity, like “F/8 and be there,” but in exactly the right spot, and not an inch to the left, right, forward, back, up, or down.
Compare the two photographs shown here. In the photograph below, I moved left and right to place the three most prominent oaks between the trees behind them. But try as I might, I couldn’t completely separate the foreground and background trees, so I climbed further up the hillside behind me and made the image above. This higher camera position created better spacing and separation between the foreground and background oaks, and a composition I’m much happier with.
(more…)
