Eloquent Images by Gary Hart
Insight, information, and inspiration for the inquisitive nature photographer
Tapping your inner Dorothy
Posted on June 12, 2018
Alone Together, Oak and Crescent Moon, Sierra Foothills, California
Canon 1Ds Mark III
8/5 seconds
F/8.0
ISO 400
Canon 70-200 f/4 L
Spend enough time on Facebook and Instagram and you get a pretty good idea of what it takes to make a picture that generates attention. The unfortunate consequence is a photographic feedback loop, where one ostentatious image inspires more similarly ostentatious images, which inspire more…, well, you get the point. This uninspired feedback loop reminds me of top-40 music, where one groundbreaking success generates a flood of uninspired clones. Catchy tunes are fine for a few listens, but few possess staying power. Contrast that to the Beatles, who aggressively resisted repetition and pursued new sounds that the world has been listing to pretty much nonstop for more than 50 years.
Admittedly, few artists are blessed with the Beatles’ creative genius, but that’s no excuse to shortcut creativity. The same holds for photography: images that elicit a reflexive Like and Share from digital passersby, and maybe (if you’re lucky) a “Stunning!” in the comments section, are forgotten with the next click. But images that resonate on a personal level by revealing something unseen, or by touching a hidden place inside the viewer, not only stop people in their tracks, they grab them and don’t let go.
Of course this sounds great in theory, but how is it accomplished? If the answer were easy, we’d all be doing it. But like Dorothy and the Ruby Slippers, perhaps we’ve had the power all along.
Because most people long for a connection with the world around them—not simply a connection with nature, but more importantly a connection with kindred souls—a good place to start would be to give viewers of your images something of yourself to latch on to by concentrating on subjects that resonate with you.
My own photography took a huge leap forward when I started photographing simply to please myself. The more I pursue moments in nature that touch me personally, (as if by magic) the more unique, gratifying, and successful my images became. While my most personal images don’t please everyone, the people they do reach seem to feel a deeper connection than they do to my images intended to impress.
Familiarity is the first step toward intimacy. With many picturesque trees and hills to work with, on this evening (as with many shoots) my compositions started wider, but didn’t seem to be about anything. But as the moon fell and the light faded, the scene’s essence began to materialize.
So what moved me to this composition? At the time it was enough that the scene finally felt right. But given the benefit of time and introspection, even though the moon and tree share the same frame, each is isolated: the tree is grounded in its terrestrial world, while the moon soars in its celestial world.
I’m writing this at Starbucks, very much by myself, but in the company of a dozen or so other people similarly isolated at the center of their world. It occurs to me that the shared isolation of the tree and moon makes a great metaphor for the human experience.
On the other hand, maybe it’s just a pretty picture….
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The cure for the summertime blues
Posted on August 15, 2016
New Moon, Sierra Foothills, California
Sony a6300
Tamron 150-600 (Canon-mount with Metabones IV adapter)
1/8 second
F/8
ISO 100
There are many great reasons to be a landscape photographer in California. Summer isn’t one of them. Most people find California’s benign whether appealing—our mild winters and dry summers are one of the Golden State’s prime attractions. But to photographers, blue skies are boring, and California’s summer skies are nothing if not blue.
We say goodbye to our clouds in May, and I go stir crazy waiting for their return in October. One summertime solution is night photography, which requires clear skies. As an added bonus, summer’s warm temperatures make fumbling with camera gear and standing around in the dark much more tolerable, and the Milky Way’s bright center is very much a summer feature. California’s dense population means extreme light pollution through much of the state, but our proximity to mountains make escaping the light relatively easy in summer.
Because I can’t always make it to the mountains, I’ve found other photo opportunities in the foothills closer to home. The wildflowers of spring are gone, and the sun has burned the once green grass a golden brown, but the foothill’s oak trees are reliable silhouettes against the colorful twilight sky. Once upon a time I was satisfied with simple silhouettes, but in recent years I’ve made an effort to include a crescent moon in my foothill oak silhouette scenes.
A crescent moon only appears in close proximity to the sun, hanging in the brightest part of the post-sunset/pre-sunrise sky, above a (relatively) dark landscape. The more of the moon that’s illuminated, the farther in the sky from the sun it will hover (a full moon is exactly opposite the sun, rising at sunset and setting at sunrise). Since a crescent rises and sets just before or after the sun, there’s not a lot of time when it’s above the horizon and the sky is dark enough for its thin outline to stand out.
Getting a crescent moon to align with my foreground subjects is all about timing—for example, some months a new moon follows the sun too closely, dropping below the horizon before the sky has darkened enough to reveal it. The next night the moon lags so far behind the sun that that getting it in the frame with my subject before the sky darkens too much requires a moon-shrinking wide angle lens. As much as I enjoy accenting a scene with a small crescent, I truly love photographing the moon large.
My most recent attempt came last Thursday, a day I’d circled in my calendar several months ago after calculating that the moon would be in the perfect twilight window—not too low or too high—for my favorite trees. My brother and I started the evening at a location with a lower horizon so we could photograph the sun setting into the trees (I blogged about that shoot last week), then zipped up the road to a spot that I’ve been photographing for years.
Sometimes I can photograph this scene from the road, but in summer the new moon sets so far north that we had to angle a little south and climb one small hill and circle another to align it with the trees in the distance. Aligning the trees and moon enabled me to shoot the entire scene with my Tamron 150-600 and Sony a6300 for maximum magnification.
There are actually two trees side-by-side atop this distant hill, but I had so much magnification, I could only photograph one at a time. I gave both trees equal time—today’s image came early in the shoot, when the moon aligned better with the left-most tree. As the moon descended to the right, I eventually turned my attention to the other tree.
Regardless of the tree I was working on, I moved around a lot, left/right and up/back, dodging cow pies, to balance the moon and tree in the frame and find a relationship that worked. By ascending a small hill behind me, I was even able to extend the shoot a few minutes before the moon finally disappeared.
It would have been very easy to stay home and do something else that night. I know these simple images aren’t big money makers, and summer moon and oak silhouettes may not be as spectacular as Yosemite Valley covered with snow, or a rainbow above the Grand Canyon, but I find photographing them no less personally rewarding. (I already can’t wait until next month.)
One more thing: See the small dot of light on the right, at about the same level as the moon? That’s Mercury, another sun-hugging visitor only visible in the dawn or dusk twilight glow.
Read more about photographing a crescent moon
A crescent moon gallery
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 