Mistakes Photographers Make—Example VII

Cow Moose; Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, USA (36mp)
Not a very good image, but good for this illustration

In the series of presenting common mistakes we photographers make, always in a simple, straightforward and understandable fashion, one of most common mistakes is including too much in the frame.  It is natural, when you are faced with the beauty of a mountain range or a vast field of flowers to try to capture all of us as we see it and as we want to remember it.  But almost never, can we recreate the emotion of the scene as we are standing there in awe of the beauty of nature.  So, we have to look beyond the obvious beauty and find a subject or multiple subjects.  Then we have to make our main subject the focus of each of our images.

The above image, admittedly not a very good image, is one that is good for illustration of this point.  The cow moose (along with her calf that is out of the frame but too far away to include in any way) was eating in this small pond in Grand Teton National Park.  A nice scene that any of us would want to capture and show our friends as a record or reminder of our trip.  The top image is how I photographed it.  I wanted to include the water, the trace of blue sky and the yellow leaves of the aspen trees.  My aim was to show the moose in the totality of her natural environment.  But it doesn't work.  Why?  Because the main subject is the moose and she is just a tiny part of the overall image. This is a classic case of me trying to include too much in the image.

Photography is an exercise in exclusion.  What do I mean by that?  We have the whole world in front of us.  We have 360 degrees of view in every direction.  But we can't faithfully record everything around us.  We get fooled by our emotional attachment to a scene or the subject matter before us.  This is true especially if we arrive at a place in which we have never been or a grand scene from nature is before us with all its beauty.  Our brains kick into high gear and we, emotionally, want to capture it in our cameras exactly how we see and experience it.  It doesn't work that way.

Your job, when standing there, is to understand this, then detach yourself from the scene emotionally and clearly try to find a part or parts of the scene that you would consider your main subject.  You can make more than one image of a scene, each with its own main subject and more detailed than an overall scene.  Once you have determined what you think you main subject should be, then you need to "exclude" and narrow down, cut out, crop out, whatever you want to call it–you want to make your main subject the focus of the image.  Not just a little part of it.  Additionally, you want to eliminate distractions in your image that take the viewer away from your main subject.

Same image cropped; Now 6.5 mp; A huge loss in quality!

In the cropped image to the right, this is how I should have captured the scene.  I should have used a longer focal length lens.  Instead of trying to record all of it, I should have narrowed down my vision to only compositionally include an appropriate surrounding of the main subject.  The moose is now the main subject and clearly the focus of the image.

The bad thing about fixing an image such as this is that you have to crop heavily.  Cropping eliminates pixels, accentuates focusing errors and decreases the quality of your image. It is much better to get it right in the camera than to fix it during your editing process.  In my illustration, the top image is 36mp and the cropped, better composed version is only 6.5mp.  By being sloppy, I have lost most of my available pixels.  Try to avoid that.

This same phenomenon is common with people in photographs.  How many times have you seen an image with a tiny person in the middle of this vast photograph.  In most cases, you cannot even tell who the person is!  But, again, you have to think about what you are photographing and who or what is the main subject.  There is nothing wrong with photographing the person up close with some of the background showing, then make another image where the overall scene, the light, the texture or quality of the light, the color, or whatever you determine, is your subject.

This is not a complicated issue so there is no reason to drone on.  Just detach your emotions from whatever exciting thing is before you and think it through.  We all do these kinds of common mistakes.  It is not anything to be ashamed of.  Just be thankful that you have the ability to be out there and taking pictures in the first place.

Thanks for looking.

Dennis Mook

Many of my images can be found at www.dennismook.com.  Please pay it a visit.  I add new images regularly.  Thank you.


All content on this blog is © 2014 Dennis A. Mook.  All Rights Reserved.  Feel free to point to this blog from your website with full attribution.  Permission may be granted for commercial use.  Please contact Mr. Mook to discuss permission to reproduce the blog posts and/or images.