The Visual Draws

I was teaching the second day of a street photography workshop in Hollywood. I had planned to take the students to Downtown Los Angeles, but plans changed when I heard mention of a farmers’ market being held just blocks away. This provided us with just as much potential for photographic opportunities as a visit to Downtown and allowed more valuable time for critiques in the afternoon.

On our second day, I wanted my students to begin photographing people and I gave them a variety of exercises, one of which was to focus on a subject’s hands. I did not want the photographers to absently make photographs of passersby just to fulfill an assignment requirement. Instead, I wanted them to pay careful attention to who they were photographing and to emphasize some element that they found especially interesting.

As soon as the photographers dispersed, I began my own hunt for an interesting subject. While walking down the crowded street, I noticed a green door that was unusually positioned at the corner of a building. I was drawn to its color and shape. I immediately knew it would serve as a great backdrop for a portrait. I made a mental note for when the right subject arrived.

The streets were blocked off so I positioned myself in the middle of the intersection and observed hundreds of men, women, and children as they passed by. There were people of all ages, races, and ethnicities moving past and around me. I felt like a large stone in a river with the water continuously flowing around it. Rather than directing my attention to the faces or clothing of these people, I looked at their hands. I was not sure what to look for, but I was certain I would know it when I saw it. Eventually, I spotted a young man with tattoos on his arms and hands. He was carrying a white plastic bag with food that he had purchased from a vendor. I approached him and asked him about his tattoos. He was friendly and when I asked permission to photograph him, he quickly agreed. I directed him to the green door I had spotted earlier.

As usual, my camera controls had been set ahead of time for the overcast lighting conditions. The camera’s ISO was set to 800 and my white balance was set for cloudy. The aperture was at f/5.6, resulting in a shutter speed well above my minimum of 1/200 second.

As I positioned the man at the door, I realized the color of his tattoos perfectly mirrored the color of the door, and his pink sweatshirt complimented those greens. I could not have asked for a better subject.

I knew that I wanted to emphasize the man’s hands and tattoos, so I adjusted the aperture on my zoom lens to f/2.8 and asked him to extend his hands forward, making sure his fingers remained in the same plane of focus. My depth of field was shallow and I wanted the tattoos on his fingers, which spelled out the word “devotion,” to be rendered tack-sharp. I made several frames, carefully refining the overall composition and making sure that I had critical focus (page 54).

I thanked the man and got his contact information so that I could e-mail him the picture later. I hoped that he would be as pleasantly surprised at seeing it as I had been in making the photograph.

Seizing Opportunities

The world is full of photographic opportunities; the challenge is whether or not the photographer is prepared to take advantage of them. The photograph of the young man with the devotion tattoo could have easily been lost to me. There was no lack of distractions to be had at that farmers’ market. I was surrounded by hundreds of people. There were vendors selling any variety of arts and crafts, clothing, and food. The air was filled with the aroma of food and sounds of voices and music. Yet in the midst of all that, I was able to see the pale green tattoos on a man’s hands that perfectly complemented a green door I had noticed mere minutes before. Was it just luck?

I might think so if it were not for the fact that I have countless stories just like this one. I’ve been in some location that was abuzz with activity and I was drawn to something in the scene upon which I built a photograph. Sometimes, those moments built up slowly. Other times they have happened within an instant. Yet I have many photographs that I believe were made possible because I was focused on seeing and not merely taking pictures.

I believe that I am able to open my eyes to the world’s visual opportunities because I observe the world rather than simply look at it. We look at things all the time, but we do not really see them.

How many times have you driven yourself home from a long day and suddenly wondered how you got yourself there? You do not even remember navigating the highways and streets. You are amazed you got home safely. This is the kind of looking most of us practice in our day-to-day lives. It is not an active, conscious seeing, but rather an instinctual act that does not ask us to think about or evaluate what we are looking at.

Good photography demands that we stop looking and begin seeing. This begins with mastering the camera and reducing its potential as a distraction by setting the core settings. This is then followed by understanding how we are seeing a thing and how that can translate into a photograph.

I was running errands one day and parked my car on the roof level of a mall’s parking lot. As I walked to the entryway, I saw the shadow of a light post on a short orange wall. I then noticed the color transition from the white of another wall, and then to the blue of the sky. I drew my camera and composed the scene, paying attention to the rails, the light fixture, and the small ledge.

As I made the photographs, I felt amused that I had found such a beautiful scene in the unlikeliest of places. When I left home that day, I never would have thought I would find a beautiful scene at the top of a parking garage, but here I was doing just that. It served as yet another reminder that photographs are everywhere if I take the time to see rather than just look.

Stop Seeing Literally

The challenge for any photographer is to learn to be more than a glorified copy machine. You want to do more than document something’s existence. There is no thought to that kind of photograph. You simply raise this box to your face and depress a button. It is nothing more than a snapshot.

To create visually interesting and engaging photographs, you must learn to stop seeing literally. By that, I mean looking at people, places, or things for how they function and move through our world. The chair is just a chair, meant for someone to sit on. The waiter is the person with whom you place an order and who brings you your food. The door is the portal through which you enter or exit a building. We see all these things for how they relate or do not relate to our lives. As a result, it is very easy to ignore virtually everything around us.

But the power of photography relies on making something extraordinary from the ordinary. Think of Edward Weston’s classic photograph of a bell pepper. A bell pepper’s function in our lives is clear enough—we eat it. We may sometimes appreciate the color, but even then, it is often about how the color will play in the look of a salad. But in Weston’s photograph, the bell pepper possesses a beautiful sensual quality, whereby its lines and curves evoke the human form. The luminosity of the bell pepper’s skin demands a complete reevaluation of what the viewer thinks he or she is seeing. We experience that vegetable not according to its function, but for how the photographer saw it and wanted the viewer to experience it.

To evoke experiences like this, you have to do more than rely on the camera to provide a sharp, in-focus photograph. You have to understand how you see and how you can use that to make rather than take photographs.

Pictures Are Everywhere

Photo opportunities exist everywhere and can happen at any time, even under the most mundane and ordinary circumstances. The mistake that many photographers make is relegating photo-worthy moments to only special occasions like vacations, weddings, and birthdays. Our lives are filled with more than those events. Ordinary moments can inspire wonderful photographs if we make the choice to observe life more carefully.

I walk my dog every day, usually following the same route, so I often see the same homes, streets, and landmarks day after day. There is nothing inherently special about any of the things I see, except for the occasional stray coyote. But one day, I walked past a house where I saw a Pontiac Skylark sitting in the driveway. I had seen the car before, but beyond admiring its classic stylings, I had never made a photograph of it. However, on that day, I saw a delivered newspaper protected in blue plastic sitting below the car’s rear bumper. I saw a visual connection between the newspaper and the car and I made a photograph. I considered not only the car and the newspaper, but also the car’s shadow and the elements at the edges of the frame. It is a simple photograph, but one that I find incredibly pleasing to look at, especially because I found it so close to home.

Moments like this serve as a constant reminder to me that I can find and make photographs whenever and wherever I am. This is why I am never without my camera. There are many days when my picture-taking occurs while I am running errands. Something will catch my attention and I will take a momentary break to create a photograph. This is often the only opportunity I have to dedicate time to my photography, but I nevertheless feel grateful for the chance to practice doing something I love.

Visual Draws

By studying the work of photographers and painters, I have come to understand the visual draws that affect and control how human beings look at a photograph or painting. These are the elements upon which I try to build my photographs when I create them, and which I use to analyze the effectiveness of those photographs when I look at them on my computer.

These visual draws are light and shadow, line and shape, color, sharpness, and gesture. Even though it is done subconsciously, each of these things influences the way someone experiences a photograph. By understanding the role of these elements in the visual experience, you, as the photographer, are able to make choices that allow you to control the viewer’s experience of an image. This understanding also helps you to evaluate your images after they have been captured to determine why they succeed or fail.