Pixiq

Finding a potentially interesting photograph is a pretty exciting moment for most photographers since it’s the reason that we own cameras and spend our free time hunting for pictures. Once you’ve found a subject with promise, however, it’s important that you push past the first flush of attraction and take time to “work” the subject a bit. Refining the shot and looking more closely at what attracted you to the subject in the first place really helps to simplify and strengthen compositions.

Often what attracts you to a scene is a clash of color, a particularly interesting bit of lighting, or perhaps just an interesting shape or texture. In the case of this bright yellow rope that I found on a dock in Camden, Maine, it was pretty much all of those things: the yellow rope, the bright but soft late-afternoon lighting, as well as the shape and texture of the coiled nylon rope. The first few shots I took, like the one below, were somewhat predictable: I included the entire coil of rope, as well as some of the dock and the water. I actually left the dock after shooting those first few photos and returned a few minutes later, nagged by that voice in my head that tells me when I haven’t looked hard enough yet.

When I returned to the rope, I began refining the composition by finding a more directly overhead view (which meant leaning out somewhat precariously over the dock from the gangplank I was standing on) and by coming in more tightly with my 18-70mm zoom lens. By extending the zoom almost all the way, I was able to crop out all of the excess baggage from the left side and lower parts of the frame. Finally, I played with the angle of the dock in the viewfinder until it created that nice diagonal line. The first photo is OK, but I feel the second image is much more graphic and dynamic.

Normally, I would shoot this type of scene with a tripod, but because I was hanging out in space on the gangplank, I wasn’t able to use one. Fortunately, there was enough light to shoot at 1/250 second while still using a relatively small aperture (f/11) to get the depth of field I wanted. By the way, if you look carefully, you’ll notice that the shadow of the cleat (upper right) has become substantially longer and more gentle in the second shot—an indicator of how long I spent trying to find the best shot.

Take time to work the subject and you’ll give yourself a lot more options in editing and printing, and as I say so often: it’s free to shoot, so what the heck.