Suspect Photography

A natural inclination of photographers, when seeing an interesting subject or scene, is to take one shot and move on. In most cases there was a good photograph in there, but by casually investing in only one shot, the full potential is missed. When you find something interesting you stand a better chance of “scoring a banger”, (meaning making a great image), simply by taking a few more shots and zeroing in on what you saw in the first place. Even if the first shot ends up being the best, at least you got a few to choose from.

A country classic: a pie straight out of the oven cooling off on a pastoral window sill.

What at first sight would seem an easy-peasy composition, needs constant compositional adjustment. Below are the shots in sequence, shown raw out of an iPhone 13 Summer 2023.

I love the shot, but the red car just kills it for me. Way too intrusive, we need to crop it out.

I try to compose the car out, but then a garbage can enters the scene. No one ever said photography was easy. Keep working.

Car is out, but that garbage can is just annoyingly a tad bit in the view middle left.

How about we just fix it in post? Quickly cloned out now but… I feel dirty solving the problem in post rather than in view finder in the moment. Do you feel dirty using cloning tools and generative fill? Tell the truth now.

This the final image. I was bouncing around the kitchen to make sure the background was not distracting and retained a sense of place. I miss the fields, but at least have a slice of them. Now how about a slice of that pie?

“You are responsible for every centimeter of your view finder”

Jay Maisels

What’s the lesson?

There are a few lessons here, but two stand out. First: watch out for the background. Second, and really equally important as the previous: keep working the scene & subject. Put more effort into making the image and you will be rewarded with better photographs.

This is my final edit on the image. I decided to stay in my style of dominant black and white and ran the file through the raw convertor in photoshop.

Upcoming Workshops Info Click Here

Upcoming Workshops Info Click Here

Main Media Workshop just announced new workshop: Finding and Developing Photographic Style taking place on campus in Camden Maine. Learn more here.

-David