Mistakes Photographers Make—Example VIII

Old Chevy, Seligman, Arizona (click to enlarge)

In my ongoing series of common mistakes photographers make is that many inexperienced or unsure photographers don't have a clear main subject in their images.  Our tendency is to include more, not less, when photographing a scene.

Photography is an exercise in exclusion.  We can start with whatever we can see in front of us, above us, below us, to the right, left or behind us and make photographs.  Our job as photographers is to not just look but "see" and find images within the cacophony of visual clutter presented to us everywhere we go.  Our job is to see what is around us, look for things of interest or people or animals doing interesting things, color juxtapositions, repeating patterns, contrasts, light patterns, sarcasm, humor, etc., etc., etc.

We must start with the entire world, then cull out the dull and uninteresting, narrowing our vision to only the subject we are trying to portray, leaving out all that is extraneous.  And, that is the problem for many–they don't know what is or is not extraneous.

Old Chevys, Seligman, AZ, as found
(click to enlarge)

Our tendency it to include too much in our images.  Why?  We have an emotional connection to what we saw and what we photographed.  Additionally, we saw everything in three dimensions as well as in the environment at the time.  It could have been at sunrise, on a rainy day, during rush hour, during silence, etc.  We have a natural tendency to want to convey our emotions and what we felt when making the image, to the image we make.  Sometimes we do that by including more of a scene in the final composition than we should as an attempt to attach our experience to the image.  Largely, we can't do that.

The image at the top of this post is a cropped image of the scene to the right.  The one to the right is how I first saw the scene.  I thought it was very interesting and had several potential images within it.  The top image shows my real subject, the old Chevrolets, rather than the clutter and confusion of the one on the right.  In the one on the right, what is the main subject anyway?  Your eye bounces from one thing to another to another.  The viewer really doesn't know.  But in the cropped version at the top, the main subject is clear.

There is no easy way to accomplish this except through looking at other images, editing our images ruthlessly and getting critiques of our images from those who know and we trust.

One way I do it is to ask myself, "What is the main subject?"  "What am I trying to portray?"  "What is in the image that doesn't really contribute to the main subject and will the image look better with it removed?"  I will then keep removing parts of the image until I reach, what I feel is, the essence of my image and main subject.  I will edit and crop with my feet instead of in editing software, to keep maximum quality and the most number of pixels in the final image.  I try hard to find a final composition in the camera and not afterward.  The old saying certainly applies here, "get it right in the camera."

When out looking at something you think is worthy of a photography, try asking yourself what the main subject is.  If you can't clearly articulate it to yourself, it is probably not a good image or not composed well. At that point, start moving around, in out, up down, etc. to see if you can improve on finding and photography a main subject.  If you are looking at images you have already made, I suggest making a print, then using paper or something similar, try cropping your image in various ways to eliminate the extraneous to "focus" on your main subject.  It may help.

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.


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