Eloquent Images by Gary Hart
Insight, information, and inspiration for the inquisitive nature photographer
Breaking the Rules
Sky on Fire, Lake Wakatipu, New Zealand
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 50
f/18
25 seconds
Let’s have a show of hands: Who feels like their photography has stagnated? Let me suggest to all with your hands up that what’s holding you back may be the very rules that helped elevate you to your current level of proficiency. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that rules are important—the glue of civilization in fact. Bedtimes, homework, and curfews got us through childhood and taught us to self-police as adults. Now we get enough sleep (right?), meet deadlines at work and home, and with very little supervision toe the line well enough to have become productive members of society—give yourself a gold star! But let me suggest that many of us have become so conditioned to follow rules that we honor them simply because they’ve been labeled “rule.”
As important as this conditioning is to the preservation of society, our reluctance to question rules sometimes impacts areas of our lives that might not be so cut-and-dried. One example would be photographers’ blind adherence to the (usually) well-intended “experts” proliferating online, in print, and at the local camera club. These self-proclaimed authorities spew absolutes for their disciples to embrace: Expose to the right!; Never center your subject!; Tack-sharp front-to-back!; Blurred water is cliché! Blah, blah, blah…. (My standard advice to anyone seeking photographic guidance is to beware of absolutes, and when you hear/read one, beeline to the nearest exit because the truth is, there are very, very few absolutes in photography.)
Rules serve a beginning photographer the way training wheels serve a five-year-old on a bike: They’re great for getting started, but soon get in the way. At first, following expert guidance, beginners’ photography improves noticeably and it’s easy to attribute this success to the rules. But by the time that improvement slows or even ceases altogether, those rules have become so deeply ingrained that it’s difficult to realize they now hold us back. You wouldn’t do Tour de France with training wheels, would you?
If photography were entirely rule-bound, engineers could write algorithms and design robots to do our photography for us. But the very definition of creativity is venturing beyond the comfortable confines of our preconceptions to create something new: if you’re not breaking the rules, you’re not being creative.
The camera club paradox
Camera clubs are great for many reasons: they connect people with a common interest, facilitate the exchange of information and ideas, and provide a forum for sharing our photographic creations. Camera clubs spur us to get out and shoot when we otherwise might stay home, and offer beginners rules that provide a stable foundation upon which to build their craft.
But camera clubs can also be a breeding ground for self-proclaimed experts, a status often not conferred to the person most qualified, but to the person who spouts photographic dogma with the most authority. The result is well-intended but too often misinformed knowledge that infects a camera club like a virus.
I’m especially troubled when I hear of images shared in a camera club photo competition that were dismissed, without consideration, because they violated the designated “expert’s” idea of an unbreakable photographic rule. Here are a few of the most popular camera club “violations” (by no means a comprehensive list):
- Blown highlights
- No detail in the shadows
- Not sharp from front to back
- Centered subject or horizon
Each of these things can be a problem, but they can be a refreshing expression of creativity as well. I can show you multiple examples in my own portfolio that violate these rules. And even if breaking an accepted photography “rule” is a problem, refusing to consider an image because it violates someone’s definition of “perfect” discounts all that’s potentially good about it.
If you’re an aspiring photographer and someone dismisses an image for a technical violation, take a step back, inhale, and remind yourself that there are very, very few absolutes in photography. In general, it’s helpful to remember that no matter how strongly it’s stated, advice that doesn’t feel right (even if you can’t articulate why) doesn’t need to be heeded.
I love using blown highlights or completely black shadows to create a striking, distraction-free background for my primary subject. Through creative selective focus, placing all but a narrow range of a scene way out of focus is a great way to emphasize my subject and soften distracting detail. And I’ll center my horizon whenever I please, thank-you-very-much.
I’ve written about horizon placement many times in the past, but since these myths persist, I’ll bring it up again (and again, and again, and …). While this advice might benefit the beginner who automatically centers everything, most people who have owned a camera for more than a day are far beyond that point. And this horizon 1/3 from the top or bottom of the frame thing? Forget about it. I have no problem giving 80 percent, 90 percent, or even more of my frame to my sky or landscape, and neither should you.
Here’s my (comprehensive) list of guidelines for where to split the sky and landscape in your frame:
- Give the area with the most visual interest the most room.
That’s it. If your scene is all about the clouds (or stars, or rainbow, or…), put the horizon near the bottom of the frame and celebrate the clouds (or stars, or rainbow, or…). The better the sky (or the less interesting the foreground), the lower the horizon can go. Conversely, if the sky is boring, by all means, minimize it and feature the landscape. And if you’re lucky enough to have a sky and landscape of equal beauty, feel free to split the frame right down the middle.
About this image
Last week, for the first sunset of the annual New Zealand winter workshop Don Smith and I do each year, we took our group to Bennett’s Bluff vista on the road to Glenorchy, for a view of Lake Wakatipu and the Southern Alps. The prime view here faces west, toward 6000-foot Tooth Peak directly across the lake, and north, up the lake toward a whole flock of more distant 6000-foot+ peaks. Beautiful any season, these peaks are at their best when sporting their winter snowpack.
When we arrived, the sun was about 15 minutes from disappearing behind the mountains left of Tooth Peak. Sometimes we can get a nice sunstar in the seconds before the sun’s departure, but this time a veil of thin clouds subdued the sun enough to thwart those plans. Not a problem, because the clouds, stained buttery yellow by late sunlight, gave us hope for even more color as the sun dropped. And large sections of the lake were glassy smooth, a rare bonus for any lake this large.
When sunset color starts, you never know what’s in store. From our perspective, the ingredients were in place: broken cloud cover, pristine winter air, and an opening on the western horizon. But the sunset viewer’s perspective is incomplete, because out of sight beneath the horizon could lurk more clouds in the sunlight’s path. So we just watch and hope.
This evening we clicked continuously as the yellow warmed to fiery orange, then held our collective breath as the color intensified and slowly transitioned to red, infusing not only the clouds, but the entire lake surface as well. It was just fortuitous positioning that placed the mountain range reflection in the glassiest water.
Armed with my 24-105 lens, I looked for a composition that emphasized the sky and reflection. And absolutely no brain cycles were wasted worrying about the placement of the horizon in this scene—I just let that happen organically, based on the other elements at play.
Though the foreground foliage couldn’t compete with the sky, peaks, and reflection, going tight enough to eliminate the shrubs entirely would have also sacrificed parts of the scene I couldn’t bear to leave out. Instead, I went wide enough to use the dense foliage to frame the bottom of the scene. My other creative decision was adding my Breakthrough Filters 6-Stop Dark Polarizer, enabling a 25-second exposure that smoothed the small waves along the curved shoreline below me.
So I guess the moral of this story is not to overthink creative decisions. When the scene is changing fast, it’s best to set the rules aside and simply trust your instincts.
Epilogue
I can’t it’s been 10 days already. This morning Don and I said goodbye to a fantastic workshop group, grateful (and relieved) to have checked off every major photography box we hope for at the start of the workshop. (And it didn’t hurt to be watching falling snow while reading about 110+ temperatures back home in Sacramento.)
Join Don and me for next year’s New Zealand adventure
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Rules Broken
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Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 
Excellent. Great observations. Will share with our Photography Club here in Panama.
Larry
Gorgeous, Gary. So happy the photography gods were with you. Very impressive th
Absolutely gorgeous images Gary and I agree about the rules.
Gary I love your macro/close-up images of the flowers. I hope you’ll
teach me better ways to do that next spring !!
I def. will bring a macro lens.
Donna Sturla
Excellent blog, Gary. Every critique is subjective, and opinions may or may not contribute to your approach to art. And thanks for freely sharing your view of the world.