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Lesson Info

Mystery and Working the Scene

I would love to be able to have enough material to have a whole class on this. I think this is what really makes a photograph good is adding a little bit of mystery and this is kind of a hard one to define in some cases. But, not telling the whole story can have more power than trying to tell the entire story. Telling something short and simple that leaves you thinking, I think is a really good thing because when you have somebody looking at your photograph you kind of want them to look at it for the longest period of time. I mean if I had a art gallery I would probably hire someone to have stopwatch on people as they went through. How long did they spend at that photo and if they come through and they just go yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, something is not engaging right, your not holding their attention. We love mysteries. Basically most stories are a mystery, what happens, I wanna hear what happens, let me figure this out. Often times this is not including the entire story. Now th...

is tells a fairly big story. You can see what's going on here. If we were to frame this up a little differently and not let you know where the end of this is then its more of a mystery of well how far back to they go. They can go back and fill the entire lake. It's the hint of what this might be like. Can be more powerful than trying to show all of them there and so one of the biggest mistakes whether its people or animals or just sort of an event the mistake is I wanna show everything in one photograph and that's not really what's most important. In some ways its more not how many their are but how dense it is. So in this case this was shot with a 200mm lens and so switching over to a 400mm lens now I'm going to scan the landscape and I'm going to figure out what's an interesting composition? where are there the most animals? what's the most interesting slice of information? in this particular photograph and I pick this little spot right down here. And now, all of those animals; I don't know why that went so fast, sorry about that. Well on this one, look at that top edge. That top edge is kind of like the magician who had a little mistake and you can see behind the curtain. Alright, we can see the illusion of what's going on here and so just a slight reframe on this and now its just a full even pattern and it can go on forever, you have no idea how long. So that adds to the mystery of that photograph. In Iceland, this was a photograph that was extremely challenging to take and the problem with this is this was back in the days of pre-digital; This was film. In order to get this composition I needed to set the camera up with a telephoto lens about 100 yards away from where we were. The camera had a 10 second self timer. Now I don't know if many of you know Olympic 100m times, they're slightly under 10 seconds and I don't know if you see me but I am not an Olympic sprinter and so getting that shot will be impossible in that situation but I had anticipated a potential problem like this and I had purchased a device that was probably from the 1950's that had a 7 second mechanical timer that would trigger the 10 seconds self timer on my camera which would give me a total of 17 seconds which is a much easier time for me to complete a 100m in. And so my buddy was holding my bike, I would trigger the camera, I would let him know I'm firing it, he would count down from 17 down to so that I could run up and I'd have about 2 seconds to jump on the bike and get in the photo. So I did this about 4 or 5 times with slightly different compositions to make sure that we got the right shot and of course I didn't know that we actually got until about 4 weeks later. But not including the top of the falls mystery of how far is that falls. It might be just right about the screen there or it can be 3 times up farther up, you don't know. And so getting in tight and filling the frame with detail is a simple recipe for guaranteed good shots in many ways. In this case this is a natural bridge down in Utah and if you look at this your brain immediately goes "okay, there's something going on here, what, what is this because this is not a natural thing". But actually it is a natural thing. But it just seems unusual and that makes you think about the photograph a little bit more exactly, "what is on the other side of this frame?" Not telling the whole story. In Morocco we went to this open air Mosque that was kind of in the midst of reconstruction and I found this kind of interesting shadow with a little bit of light and this is like one of those optical games where is it pointing in or pointing out. Its kind of hard to tell and its just not real clear. Its a very abstract photo and there is a lot of fun little abstract photos that you can find all over the place. You can be in a place where its just most photographers will go there and they'd just say "I don't see anything to photograph". And you know they're looking for kind of the obvious things, they're looking for a great looking person to photograph or a beautiful landscape. Just a change of mindset and suddenly you're aware of different things that are around you that other people are just are looking right past. Just be aware of everything around you. So not showing the entire face. A hint of what's goin on, does this seem enjoyable or not? Just that slight hint of something that's going on. I think I've shown this photo previously in this class but this is a very common photo from or similar place to shoot from Petra in Jordan. Here its that exact hint. It's not filling the frame, it's a little slice of wonder that makes you go "I wanna see that whole thing, I wanna walk down that canyon and walk in and see that entire front entrance." But this is that tantalizing appetizer that makes you go "I want more." Typically that's a really good story. When you end up with the story and your like, "That was good, I'd like more of that same stuff." Okay, I think this is just a weird shot. I was on a boat and I looked up and can you figure out what's going on? You get an idea of something that's going on and there was a canvas roof over the back of this boat and the birds would land and stand on it. And so that's why it ended up looking like this. But, its like is it upside down, is this right, what's going on? Its got some mystery to it that makes you think about that photograph and look at it. Its not the worlds greatest photograph by any means but it makes you think and that's a real good engagement with the viewer of your photographs. In Venice, using the a longer shutter speed, adds a little bit of mystery. That's one way of adding mystery, just having blur in the photograph because it gives the viewer a little bit of information about what's moving. We understand that on photography at this point. We know those things are moving but its different from the way we see it with our own eyes. So that is one way of adding a little bit of mystery is using those slower shutter speeds in a variety of ways. I had several days outside of the Blue Mosque here in Istanbul, Turkey and I had found many different locations in which to shoot around this Mosque. Kind of on a separate note from this particula photo I found it kind of interesting cause I did Google searches, on what it looks like from an aerial perspective and I knew my hotel was here and the mosque was here and there were some open areas here, and there were some stuff over here, and I'm looking at this map and its like a treasure map to me. Where are the x's? Where are the good spots to land, to stay on in order to get good shots? And I found after 3 or 4 days I ended up with about 5 different locations where I got compositions that looked really nice. And for me their were like these little hot spots these invisible x's on the ground where its great here but here its not a shot. So its kind of like this little scavenger hunt. Where is it? But your not looking on the ground your looking with your eyes and with your cameras as to where things are. So I found a spot right here that has nice framing which is a topic that we'll have a little bit later on. But in order to add a little bit more mystery I wanna make the subject a little bit smaller. I don't wanna make you find the subject a little bit more maybe in this photograph its not the thing that you come to right away its just a beat after that. You look at the photograph and then suddenly you realize "Oh wow", those aren't tree branches or anything else. So I think that adds a little bit more mystery to the photograph. So if you wanna create some mystery with your photographs show only a part of the subject, figure out what part you need but don't have the entire subject in there. Using a different technique, might be a different angle of view or positioning for it. You can also potentially use some sort of blur, maybe a panning technique or if the subjects moving something like that. So that's how a few little tips on creating some mystery. So John, first of all just so to say, you started the class saying that formula for taking great photos is the camera, plus time, plus effort, plus knowledge; Using Google to look from above and find spots for your photos that is taking it up a notch, right? I mean that is some serious effort. Well that's knowledge of where your going and what your doing. Exactly, exactly, I love it. I did not know you did that. If you were a celebrity photographer and some famous celebrity was gonna come and you were going to photograph them I would want to know about them. I mean what's their favorite food, I wanna have it here so that they're happy. What type of music do they like? What topic can I bring up? Oh they have an interest in this, I'm going to talk about that and so knowledge of your subject is very important. We do have a couple of questions for you and a lot of them are around as you were talking about getting tighter into the frame in terms of your composition, number of folks have talked about how sometimes when they then go to print a photograph they're gonna get cut off because of whatever size they go to for that print so do you think about photographing a little bit wider knowing that in post you can crop it down? How does your mind work in the field with that? Well, the answer to that is, the most common answer in the class is that I do have a slide for that and it will be coming up but this is a preview, yes, one of the things to do just kind of as a best practice in what I do is I shoot the photo exactly as I want it and I get that tight shot perfect and then I think well I might need this in some other different format lets just back off a little bit and get a wider shot. And so when I say take that perfect shot sometimes is what I mean is present that tight composition and so yes, if you do need to shoot it a little bit tighter. But, in some ways I think, go in get it as best you can in the camera and then back off and get that second shot. So that's one of the beauties of this is you can have 2 different versions and then you can have both of those and use them as necessary. Great. Thank you. Alright, simplify the chaos, block those intrusions, filling the frame, and then just hiding a little bit to add that mystery. So this is just kind of all the prequel getting into the composition session. I don't know that I've ever walked into a brand new situation took a bunch of photos and the first photo was the best photo. I mean, in theory, it should be and I think for there was a classification of photographers that could do that and they were typically 4x photographers who would go out and they would have 4 pieces of film with them. They were going to shoot 4 photos there was not a a lot of opportunity for experimenting and so in there cases think how much scouting you would do if you had 4 shots. You would be checking is this the right spot no I did need to be here, now do I want this lens or that lens. I'm gonna double check triple check everything to make sure that its exactly right and nowadays because of the ease and simplicity of taking photos people are like wow click this, click this, click this and I'll figure it out later. Okay now that's a pretty bad technique but I think probably the most efficient technique is to scout it out, start taking photos, analyze them, look at them try to make some adjustments in the field so that you can fix that and improve that right there when you can. So a good example of this is in Seattle over at the Ballard of Locks. We got these medal sculptures that are kind of interesting. Now I have no doubt that their are a thousand photographs on Flickr from tourist who came to Seattle, walked across the little bridge saw these and just took this photo. And this is a terrible photo. It is technically in focus, it is technically exposed correctly, but we've got way too much foreground that has nothing going on. We've got the condos in the background, a bunch of big white sky. This isn't the right place to be. Step one. Well step one is. okay, stepping closer. Literally stepping closer, filling the frame more with your subject. Okay, this is a little bit better, everything that was wrong in the previous one is still wrong here but to a lesser degree. Alright, use your feet. Walk around. Put some effort in, try some different angles and the fact of the matter is, I do not know how to photograph all of these spirals without a lot of junk in the background. Its just the way their is. There is no way of shooting with shallow enough depth of field. There is not enough room to back up in that situation. But once again, who says you have to tell the story of everything that you see there. Getting down on your back, putting in a little effort, getting your clothes a little dirty, and using the wide angle lens you can have very simple and clean background. Or using the telephoto lens and going in and just showing part of the subject playing around with depth of field. This is what I did and I ended up with a variety of results some of which you may like or dislike but as you can kind of see my progression here and I really liked the shape of this and I like the clean background on it My favorite shot was one of my last shots which was this one here. Very simple, very graphic. Close in, if I worked for the insurance company for the city to show the environment where these sculptures are I would be fired instantly. But that is not my job, I was just trying to take a photograph that pleased me that I would like to share with somebody else and that's what I ended up with and so compared to the insurance company's photo which is good for what they're doing, I don't want to have a slam on insurance folks you know you got to do what you got to do it's not art in that regard So I think that this is a much more appealing shot.