"Seeing" the image afterwards and other problems.

A week with David Ward on his masterclass in Assynt, Scotland, really got me thinking about my approach to my photography.Back in 2011 I realised the importance of getting what I called "the other shot", and wrote a post about it. The inspiration there was Matthew Ashton's excellent sport photography blog which is always worth a read whatever you shoot.It so happens that David Ward has just written on the same subject, but much more eloquently than I ever could, in On Landscape. Go on, subscribe - it's worth it!Getting "the other shot" became a bit of a mission for me while I was shooting sports, as it is so vital to get something different to the other photographers surrounding you. Having thrown in the towel on the sports scene a while back to focus on landscape photography, I completely forgot about my own mission and took a number of steps backwards as a result.When presented with a "grand landscape", my initial reaction has been to get the big view and the obvious shot, rather than thinking about the composition or the atmosphere or feeling of the place more carefully. I also have a tendency to "get a banker in", in other words to get an image of the obvious view of wherever it is I am, or the shot I visualised when planning a trip, and only then do I relax and have a proper look around. It took some guidance from Mr Ward to get me back on track and get my brain engaged, at least partially. His method, though he says he doesn't really have one, is one of trying to express how a place feels to him, and is much more contemplative than I usually am.Thomas Heaton has an interesting approach (and an nicely evolving Youtube channel - he has a super presentation style too). He goes out with the intention of making just one image. He doesn't care if it's a picture which has been done a thousand times before, as he simply enjoys being out and shooting for himself, presumably when he's not working to a client's brief.  He takes a lot of care to get that one picture, and once he has it he then takes his time to see what else he can find in the vacinity.Even after absorbing much "Wardness" in Scotland, it's still very difficult to put the lessons into practice and change habits built up after years of high-speed action sports work. I find it very difficult to see in 2 dimensions, as an image would appear on screen or in print. I think some people just find it very easy to see graphic shapes and lines in 2D within a chaotic and busy 3D environment. I don't. As a result I find I often only "see" the picture when I am reviewing my images on a big screen after I have got home.Here's an example where I've put part of the solution into place, but missed the rest of it. I stopped at the Falls of Falloch near Loch Lomond and managed to work out that a broad, all-encompassing image of the waterfall might not make the most of the situation. Instead I decided to take a longer lens and a closer view of the contrasting softness of the water and the nicely curved, ice covered rock next to it. Excellent - I had managed not to take the obvious shot and look for something different. But - the first thing I did was take a picture of the waterfall because it was the obvious subject, even though I finessed the composition I still did the obvious thing.It was only once I had that image in the bag that I started hunting around for other things. Sliding down some slick, ice coated rocks brought me down to the water's edge where I found some beautifully contoured shapes in the stone plus a couple of little frozen pools.Dial in a 1/2 sec shutter speed, small aperture to keep everything sharp, 28mm lens and bam, there's a nice picture. It was only when I was looking through my images that evening that I realised that my composition was all wrong. I had thought it was all about the soft foreground lines against that angular background rocks, but of course it's the way the flowing water matches the rock strata that is the key part of the image, with the three lighter frozen pools helping to convey the coldness of the scene. The distant bank is completely irrelevant as is the frozen pool on the right in the middle distance. I should have seen this at the time and "worked" the scene harder.I ended up cropping the image quite hard to get what I wanted. I don't mind doing this, but losing 2/3s of the pixels is pretty careless and restricts the ability to print large. It's OK for web images, and I am very happy with the final image. But...I could have done a much better job if I had thought more about it and looked harder at what was in front of me. Here's the final composition.I have another example where pure luck has resulted in a much more interesting image than I had thought it would be at the time. Driving up through a stunning snow covered landscape north of Ullapool, I found myself confronted by what I can only describe as a ludicrously odd looking scene. I left the car in the road, grabbed my gear and scrambled through waist deep snow to this:What? What? I couldn't work out what was going on. Eventually the penny dropped and I figured out that the snow must have blown into ridges or ripples on the ice surface of the lake (lochan) and as the sun had come up it had started melting, leaving these stripes over the surface. An hour later and the snow lines were gone. An hour earlier and it was just plain white. Wowza - what a scene.Knowing it wouldn't be like this for long I was completely focused on just capturing the scene. "Taking" a picture instead of "making" one. This is an important distinction which I've only started to recognise fairly recently. I think to "make" a picture is to compose with specific care to create something which the casual observer would otherwise never really see, usually by making specific relationships between the components of the scene. "Taking" a picture is a simpler approach which records the scene as you see it without the attention to detail of placement of the elements within it.I know I should be "making" pictures, but when confronted with something like this I sort of lose the plot and don't take enough care. There's an urgency to get a shot which overrides compositional thought. Even after a week of being "Warded" I found I was rushing this one. My response in these situations is not to slow down and think, but to take a lot of pictures from different spots in different compositions and hope one works. This is obviously wrong and something that I find I need to work very hard at to overcome.I did have a few brain cells engaged though, and after "snapping" a bunch of wide shots of the overall scene I started to think a bit more. I spotted a nice little rock which I could use as a foreground anchor and, if placed correctly, could link in to the mountain of Stac Pollaidh in the background. Yes! A clever compositional device. My expensive masterclass was paying off big time. I took a bunch of horizontal and vertical pictures - the light was pretty constant and the snow ridges were melting in front of my eyes.On returning back to our cottage of beer and crisps that evening, I picked the one of the 23 shots of the scene that I liked the most. Here it is:The foreground rock works nicely, there's some good patchy light on the mountains, and it's pretty dramatic.It was only afterwards that one of my friends pointed out that the foreground profile of the snow edge pretty much mirrors the profile of the mountains in the distance, and the clouds are arranged in lines a bit like the snow on the ice. "Of course" I confirmed, this was all totally intentional. Not.In my urge to "get the shot", even though I had been thinking of the "compositional device" of mirroring the distant peak of Stac Pollaidh with the little rock, I had completely missed the much bigger picture in the scene. The matching lines and profiles give a much greater feel to this image than the simple "lets stick a little rock in the foreground" approach.Happily my "shoot a bunch of pictures and hope one turns out well" approach paid off in this situation, and I have luckily ended up with an image which is much stronger than it has any right to be. My point is that I should have paid much more attention to my surroundings and been able to see this juxtaposition of the elements of the scene and purposefully composed this shot rather than getting it as the result of a happy accident. More time thinking and looking, less time pressing buttons!As a final aside, I stopped at this lochan again a two hours later. All the snow ridges had gone, replaced by a matt, dark icy surface. The weather had turned and snow storms were blowing in. The light was much more interesting, so I found a spot and waited out a blizzard to get the following image. Now, if only I'd had this light and weather with the snow ridges, or maybe that's just being greedy.