I’m often amused by how, having spent a couple of hours taking a few hundred photographs, some of them pre-planned and given lots of time and attention at the time of shooting, it can be the shots I take almost as an afterthought that can prove to be the ones that I like the best.
I guess it’s all about setting expectations, and the more you plan and pre-visualize a particular shot, the more pressure there is to execute it to a standard that is high as you hoped… and the more likely you are to fail to achieve this. Take a shot off the cuff on the other hand and you have really have nothing to lose. If it doesn’t work you’re not too put out, but if it does – well, happy days.
The photograph above is an example where this happened to me recently. It’s a shot I took, almost as I kept walking, during the preparations for the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin. To you it might not be anything special, but to me, given how little time and, to some extent, attention I gave the shot in contrast to some others I took that day, the end result is far in excess of my expectiations.
I was walking from the area where the bands were getting ready towards the media bus from which I was going to watch the actual parade, and came across these instruments sitting on the road, with music clipped into the stands. Their owners, members of a german brass band, were about to pick them up and as I passed something made me stop momentarily and literally grab a shot before they were taken away.
The only thought I can remember having in relation to taking control of the shot was to use a wide aperture for narrow depth of field, and to make the music the subject of the photo by focusing on that. This thought went through my head as I knelt down, raising my camera to the eye, and adjusting the aperture and shifting the focus point to the right of the viewfinder as I did so. I was in aperture-priority mode from earlier shots and so I knew the shutter speed would correct itself.
Within seconds I was on my way again, heading towards Parnell Square, and almost forgot about even taking the photograph until I imported it onto the laptop later that day. It made it through my first cull of images – something I always do after taking a high volume of shots to limit how many I will post-process, and a decision making process that is based on first impressions. It had a batch process applied, and made it through my second cull to select a number of images for the slideshow. And when I looked for some images to post here it was one of the first I picked.
Given that it took literally seconds to take and process the photo, that’s a pretty good return from very little investment, and a nice reminder that sometimes the best photos are the ones that require the least effort.
I really appreciated your comment about the less-is-more when taking a photo. Of course, we tend to immediately think “less clutter” but sometimes that clutter is not in the image, but in our heads.
Of course, getting to drop the mental clutter takes a lot of practice. You need to know all the technicalities, the knowledge of what you have to do – and indeed can do – to create/capture an intuitive image.
It’s perhaps like really experienced musicians. They don’t have to think about the moves they need to produce that particular note. The fingers/lips/muscles all “automagically” just do it.