Vision - Vanishing Points
What can you say about the story in the picture above? Are your eyes focusing on a particular subject or are they scanning unable to focus anywhere? Some people might like this picture. For me, I don’t like it. If you know why I don’t like it, then you will see why vision is so important to photography. And it is something I practice every time I go out and shoot these days (yes, and I practice my focus too).
Part of the reason why I don’t like this image is because it is flat. This was shot with a 200 mm focal length using about an f-8 aperature. Telephoto lenses tend to flatten or compress an image. It can be interesting but in this case it isn’t. Another problem is the foreground. It is blurry. I needed a subject to focus on and I needed an idea or vision before I started taking pictures in this scene. And as far as execution, which was flawed here, I needed the correct focal length, aperture, shutter speed, iso, and all of the stuff I should have prepared, practiced, and planned before this trip. But back then I didn’t know what I was doing. My picture taking was haphazard, but I was having fun.
Is this picture salvageable? If you have vision, yes! What I continue to learn with my photography is patience. Trust intuition. Pay attention to where your eyes direct you.
Just by cropping the image by 2/3 we have a completely different picture. It is more interesting. It is telling a story: a boy walking home from school (possibly). Not only do we have a simple to recognize subject, but the background and the foreground are more interesting. Why? Because we have depth. The reason we have depth, is because lines of the buildings aren’t parallel, because they are headed to a vanishing point. A vanishing point adds depth and perspective and can draw interest. There is only one vanishing point in this picture. Where is it? The next picture taken at a different point of view and a different lens focal length should help provide the answer.
The horizontal lines come closer together at the left of the image above, meaning the vanishing point is to the left. The two vertical Iines show the area of the cropped image of the boy walking home from school. From this new point of view it is easier to see the perspective: the all important perspective that provides depth to an image and often provides interest. And it is clear, standing on this bridge, I was way too far away from my subject who at that point in time, isn’t in the picture. Perhaps he is in that crowd of people on the right? I should have been way over there shooting instead of on the bridge! This is why zoom lenses can get you into so much trouble. They make you lazy and often have you focus too far out into the vanishing frontier, where you create a really boring picture. If I could go back in time I would be focusing on the people that were with me on or near the bridge!
Even though I said, perspective can add interest to a photo, there are times when you can get a very striking picture with a very flat image. More on this in a future blog post. For now enjoy this last image.
What is the subject or subjects? What is the story? Now if I could get that boy with the back pack to walk into this scene, then I would really have something! Now that I have a vision for a picture I want to take, well, sometime soon my vision will become an actual picture on my memory card!
