by Brenda Tharp
—HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON
PHOTOGRAPHS HAVE INCREDIBLE POWER TO convey the mood of a situation, whether it’s joy, horror, tranquility, or festivity. Photography can also reveal the moments and gestures in both the natural and the man-made world.
When we look at pictures of people engaging in sports, we can feel the energy of the action and any moments of triumph and despair that were captured. When we see wildife photographs, we feel the same energy in a photo of, say, a running gazelle. When we view photographs of moments in time of any kind, we respond according to the story they tell and the emotions that are expressed in the picture.
As photographers, we have a great opportunity to see and capture motion, moments, gestures, and mood in the world around us, making our images resonate with energy and meaning. Use the camera as your license to be curious, to get closer, and to explore more deeply.
As you read on, you will learn how to incorporate this ability to capture energy in ways that will make your pictures more expressive.
BRISTLECONE PINE AND STAR TRAILS, EASTERN CALIFORNIA. Even at 800 ISO, I needed 6 1/4 minutes to capture enough trailing of the stars. I turned noise reduction on, used my remote release with the locking button, and pressed the release. It was incredibly peaceful up at 12,500 feet. 24–105mm lens at 24mm, f8 at 637 sec.
CELEBRATING MOMENTS
BREACHING HUMPBACK WHALE, ALASKA. These whales are amazing to see, yet not easy to capture. They suddenly appear, hurtling their bodies into the air. Fast shutter speeds are required: 1/800 just made it. Keeping shutter speeds high while searching for whales helps you be prepared for the action. 100–400mm lens at 300mm, f5.6 at 1/800 sec.
A whale breaching, a bird taking flight, a child laughing—all of these express a unique moment in time. Candid moments, those spontaneous actions in nature and of humans, can help to create an expressive photograph. For an outdoor and nature photographer, candid moments are the icing on the cake. For all the research and planning that might go into a trip to photograph the wildebeest migration in Africa, you still can’t predict what the animals will do once you’re there.
Since candid moments are so unpredictable, it might seem impossible to apply ideas of visual design or good composition to them. Just capturing the moment is often thrilling enough for some photographers. But a great moment in nature doesn’t guarantee a great photograph. Capturing the moment is a combination of technical and artistic skills. If you hone your reflexes, you’ll respond more quickly to capture a fleeting moment; likewise, if you’ve developed your artistic vision, you stand a much better chance of capturing a moment creatively. You have to be ready for a situation when, suddenly, right there in front of you, “it” happens. Chance favors the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur put it.
LAKE CLARK NATIONAL PARK, ALASKA. Grizzly bear checks out the territory. 100–400mm lens at 400mm, f /5.6 at 1/200 sec.
The key is to hone your timing. Parks are great places to practice. Dogs are running and leaping, and adults and children are playing You get wildlife action and people moments within one contained area. And many dogs, such as retrievers, will fetch until exhausted, so you’ll have plenty of opportunity to practice your timing. Whether it’s people or animals, capturing moments is an exciting part of photography for me.
CAPTURING GESTURE
SHEEP AND LAMB, IRELAND. I loved the gesture of this mother sheep protecting her newborn lamb as I approached with my camera. 70–200mm at 200mm, f10 at 1/60 sec.
Gesture often defines a moment in a photograph and adds to the expressive nature of a picture. A smile almost universally signals happiness or friendliness; hands folded in prayer generally represent a desire for connection with a greater spirit; hands held high at the end of a race signify empowerment, a “Yes!” gesture. We understand the gestures of many animals, too—stretching, yawning, play fighting, stalking, nurturing. Consider, too, some of nature’s more dramatic gestures—lightning bolts, volcanoes, calving icebergs, and rainbows. Even inanimate objects can express gesture, such as the way a flower nods or a tree reaches into the sky.
These poignant gestures breathe life into a photograph and make your images resonate with visual energy. To increase your ability to capture a gesture, you must develop your skills of observation. The more you observe, the better you’ll be at anticipating a moment of gesture. Practice making photographs in places where moments and gestures happen regularly, such as wildlife refuges, zoos, parks, or lively outdoor markets.
Many photographers today use their continuous frame mode to capture a series in the hopes they’ll have captured the peak gesture or moment somewhere in there. But it still requires good timing and anticipation skills to know when to start the series, or you might miss the moment altogether. To become better prepared, develop an awareness of the moments or actions that tend to occur in certain situations that you like to photograph. Watching large flocks of snow geese, you’ll learn that certain hawks or airplanes can startle them into taking flight en masse. Boaters tend to take a similar route down a rushing river, and after the first one or two go by, you’ll have a better sense of what to expect. If you just think about gesture in everyday things, you’ll be more aware of them all around you.
GRIZZLY BEARS, ALASKA. When the cub climbed on Mom’s back, I knew I had a cute photograph! I took several, but in this one, all three of them seemed to be looking in the same direction. 500mm lens with 1.4x, f/6.3 at 1/500 sec.
Prepared with the knowledge of what can happen, you can go into a situation and be ready to seize the moment. I knew what to expect at an outdoor market in Bhutan, since I had been to farmers’ markets near my home. Photographing running dogs in a local park prepared me to capture race horses in western Ireland. However, on my first trip to Alaska many years ago, I hadn’t had any experience with whales and was failing miserably at capturing the peak moment when they surfaced with mouths open. I couldn’t tell where they were going to pop up, so I was usually pointing in the wrong direction. A helpful naturalist taught me how to see changes in the surface tension of the water that indicate where the whale is about to emerge. What a difference that made!
Many photographers talk about having a sixth sense when it comes to capturing moments, and that’s been true for me. If your observation skills are strong and you are attuned to what’s taking place around you, you can often sense the moment before it happens, perhaps because you are subconsciously familiar with the situation. I’d love to say that I always sense the moment and capture it, but I don’t. It’s a lifelong goal, so every trip into the wildlife refuge, a village, or a festival is an opportunity for me to continue to try for those instances when light, design, and gesture all come together in one fantastic moment.
SAGUARO NATIONAL PARK, ARIZONA. I waited out a rainstorm because I knew there was a chance for a rainbow and great afternoon light, with the clearing on the horizon. Nature makes her own great gestures at times with rainbows! 24–70mm lens at 55mm, f/18 at 1/40 sec.
EXPRESSING MOTION
THE CAMARGUE, FRANCE. Fast action requires fast shutter speeds. If you’re trying to freeze motion, it’s usually best to go one stop higher than you think you need, to make sure you get the shot. Since the horses were coming toward me, I could keep the shutter speed a little lower and go for more depth of field with a smaller aperture. Skill at this develops with practice and evaluation of results. 100–400mm lens at 275mm, f/10 at 1/500 sec.
In this constantly moving world, it only makes sense that we would try to show the motion that we see and experience all around us, even when using still cameras. Of course, a still photograph can provide only an illusion of motion; nonetheless, an image can be quite effective in creating a sense of speed or portraying the fluidity of movement. In a photograph of a car driving along a dusty road, the trailing dust cloud tells us the car is moving. The split-second shutter speed that captures a bird in midflight, and the long exposure that records water flowing over rocks, each express motion, in very different
ways. Both, however, capture the magic of motion.
To photograph motion, you can freeze it, let the action move through your still scene, or pan with the movement. Each situation calls for a different technique. First, ask yourself what effect of motion you want to bring out, then use that answer to decide which technique will give you the best results.
FREEZE FRAME
Freezing motion is aimed toward capturing the peak moment of action, a view we never experience with our own eyes as we watch a moving scene. When you use a high shutter speed to freeze the action, you can seize that peak moment. You can also create visual tension in freeze-frame moments. Imagine a hand reaching toward the volleyball but not yet touching it, or a bird plunging toward the water, captured in-camera just before impact.
A shutter speed of anywhere from 1⁄250 to 1⁄2000 can stop most fast action. To determine how fast your shutter speed should be, you have to factor in the distance from camera to subject, the focal length you’re using, the direction your subject is moving in relation to the camera, and the speed at which they are moving. The closer you are to your subject or the longer the lens, the faster the shutter speed will have to be to freeze the motion; in a narrow field of view, the time it takes for your subject to travel through the frame is very short and the motion is amplified. If the path of movement is parallel to the sensor plane, you’ll need a faster shutter speed than if the movement is perpendicular or diagonal to the sensor plane. Huh? Don’t worry, there are charts you can use as reference, to get you in the ball park. The rest comes from practice and evaluation of your results.
SNOW GEESE IN FLIGHT, CALIFORNIA. In this image, I froze the birds in flight with a high shutter speed. It’s a competent image with nice light, but it’s a static picture of birds frozen in time. 500mm lens, f /7.1 at 1/800 sec.
Remember the retriever playing in the park I mentioned earlier in this chapter? He’s still out there. Master your timing by photographing him leaping for a ball, and you’ll be ready when the cheetah pounces on its prey on your African safari.
MOVIN’ AND SHAKIN’
Another terrific way to express motion is by panning. I love the look of this technique. Panning enhances the action and shows the “choreography” of the motion. You can still feel the excitement and tension in a slow-shutter panned image of white-water rafting. Elements overlap in the scene, their hard edges becoming softer as they blend together, and the blending of the background often “cleans” up the clutter.
SANDHILL CRANES, BOSQUE DEL APACHE, NEW MEXICO. On this visit to Bosque del Apache, we arrived at dawn, hoping for a great sunrise to illuminate the daily liftoff of the birds. It wasn’t meant to be, but the lower light levels meant slower shutter speeds were possible. As the birds lifted off, I tracked them through the viewfinder. 100–400mm lens at 400mm, f/ 5.6 at 1/15 sec.
To get the full impact of the movement of your subject, choose a shutter speed that allows for enough blurring yet retains enough detail to define the subject. This tip may sound vague, but there is no formula for panning with slow shutter speeds. Situations vary greatly, and the surprise factor makes it fun and challenging. Generally, a faster shutter speed will record less movement in the subject, and may make the background more distinct than you desire. Again, the results will be affected by the speed and direction the subject is traveling in relation to your camera and the focal length you’re using.
If you want a smoothly panned background, put your camera on a tripod. This only works if you use a tilt/pan type of head, however. A ball head, once loosened, is like not using a tripod at all. With all panning techniques, the only real way to develop a sense of what works is to experiment.
Finally, remember the importance of composition when photographing motion. If you don’t put enough space in front of a moving object, blurred or not, the image will appear crowded and off-balance, with too much visual tension.
GOING WITH THE FLOW
Even with a still camera we can capture the series of movements that constitute action. Imagine a quiet forest with a stream running through it. You will want the scene to be still, but not necessarily the water. You might want the blur of horses running through a beautiful meadow, with the meadow still and sharp. To get any environment around your moving subject to remain sharp when using slow shutter speeds, you’ll need to use a tripod. If the light level is too bright to get slow enough, even when using small apertures, a variable neutral density filter can “dial in” more density, which then allows you to slow the shutter down even more.
GOLDEN REFLECTIONS, MERCED RIVER, CALIFORNIA. A shutter speed of 1/25 second stopped the movement enough to create a metallic surface reflection. 100–400mm lens at 400mm, f /11 at 1/25 sec.
ST. GEORGES RIVER, MAINE. 70–200mm at 200mm, f /16 at 1/2 sec.
The shutter speeds necessary to capture different amounts of blurred movement vary widely and depend upon the speed your subject is moving. The faster the subject is moving, the faster the shutter speed will have to be, to a degree, to show the blur. For instance, if you try to capture the blur of a dog running through your still scene using a 2-second exposure, you may see nothing on the frame! The slower the shutter speed and the faster the movement, the more transparent the object becomes. A 1/2 second might be a better solution for this. Remember, too, that the focal length will affect your shutter speed choice, as will the distance between camera and subject and the direction of movement.
Reference charts can be very useful here, too, but it’s also great fun just to try it and learn through experience. When I do something that works, the memory of how I did it gets stored in my mind’s “library” for later reference.
I love to photograph moving water and prefer a soft effect to convey its fluid and ethereal qualities. When water moves through the frame, the light reflecting off of it can “paint” across the sensor, creating an artistic interpretation. When you paint with light like this, you never really know how the image will look until you try it. You will be creating one-of-a-kind results, which is part of the excitement as you try for the “right” effect. Experiment by varying your shutter speeds within a certain range, and you’ll be assured of getting something that works from the exercise. For swiftly moving water, I usually set the shutter speed between 1/8 second and 2 seconds. That’s a pretty wide range, but with practice, you’ll learn that a rushing river takes a certain shutter speed to blend it together, and a swirling eddy in a stream takes another. Wider angles of view require slower shutter speeds and telephoto ones require slightly faster ones to capture the blur, due to the time it takes for motion to traverse the frame in the different focal lengths. Review the picture on the LCD and vary the shutter until you get what you want.
WESTERN IRELAND. Capturing this peaceful scene, I positioned myself so the water flowed away from the camera, taking the viewer on a visual journey to the background. I used a tripod to render the overall scene sharp, and a slow shutter speed to let the water blur softly. Overcast light was perfect for bringing out details in this scene. 24–105mm lens at 40mm, f /11 at 1/3 sec.
THREATENING SKIES, DEATH VALLEY, CALIFORNIA. Stormy skies often mean rain, but not always for Death Valley. Still, this particular morning looked quite promising for rain. To accentuate the sky, I merged three exposures with Photomatix software into an HDR image, then adjusted it to emphasize the stormy mood. 16–35mm lens at 16mm, f /16 at 1.5 seconds.
MARSHALL POINT LIGHTHOUSE, MAINE. Twilight is a wonderful time. The blue hues of the coming of night are tranquil yet mysterious. When I saw this view from the porch of the light keeper’s house, I knew I had a great mood-evoking image. 24–70mm lens at 60mm, f /16 at 1/2 sec.
CHAPEL, YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, CALIFORNIA. During a rare midautumn snowstorm, I took my workshop group out to photograph in the valley. The chapel is a classic icon, and the falling snow added a great mood to the scene. 70–200mm lens at 100mm, f /7.1 at 1/50 sec.
{CHAPTER EIGHT}
ARTISTIC INTERPRETATIONS
“The less descriptive the photo, the more stimulating it is for the imagination. The less information, the more suggestion; the less prose, the more poetry.”
—ERNST HAAS
THIS IS THE CHAPTER WHERE YOU GET TO TELL YOUR internal critic to take a hike while you play around with new ideas and experiment with abstraction and impression.
In order to get the most out of this chapter, you should release your need to have perfect results. Digital photography allows you to experiment freely: If you don’t like it you can simply delete it! When you make a photograph that is highly interpretive (i.e., an abstract or an impressionistic work), there are no hard-and-fast rules. For some of the techniques I will discuss, there are basic steps you will need to follow to get the general effect, and then you get to experiment. Each panned image, multiple exposure, and montage will be a one-of-a-kind picture—and therein lies the magic and fun! The only limit to your experimentation is your imagination. Your willingness to abandon traditional approaches can expand and enhance your results.
Some special effects are now done on the computer, as my digital camera can’t do some things that film used to do so well. I also use some wonderful plug-ins to Photoshop and other software applications that allow me to continue my creative vision once I have the picture in the computer. Let’s get started!
AUTUMN TREES, CALIFORNIA. I love to make painterly abstracts of nature. You can probably guess these are trees, but it was the blending of colors and the suggestion of trees that interested me the most when I made this picture. 100–400mm lens at 400mm, f /16 at 1/3 sec.