How to Find Compositions When a Location Overwhelms You

You arrive somewhere beautiful, raise the camera, and every frame comes back looking like a postcard someone else already took. Too much to look at can stall your composition faster than too little, and the fix often starts with seeing less of the scene through a viewfinder, a long lens, or an in-camera crop mode.

Omar Gonzalez spent a fall trip in Vermont fighting exactly that problem, and he's candid that the first day went badly. Everything he shot felt like a tourist snapshot, and he got frustrated enough to stop vlogging altogether. That turned out to have an upside. With the camera talk gone, he started enjoying the fog, the drive, and the trees changing color around him. Gonzalez splits image makers into two rough groups: people who can scan a scene and pull a dozen hidden photographs out of it, and people like him who have to see a frame before they recognize it. If you're in the second group, a crowded, gorgeous location is one of the hardest places to work.

His answer is a set of what he calls compositional blinders, three ways to cut down the visual noise until a picture shows up. The first is to close or turn off the rear LCD and work only through the viewfinder. A small window pressed against your eye removes the periphery and makes you build one frame at a time instead of taking in the whole valley. The second is a long lens. A 70-200mm zoom is a reasonable start, Gonzalez carried a 300mm, and he points out that something as long as 1,000mm will pull out shapes nobody standing beside you will notice. At those focal lengths, context drops away, and a viewer reads patterns and forms instead of a place. He already uses this approach for abstract city work, and he says it works just as well on the road.

Painters solved this long before cameras existed. Art students still carry a small cardboard window, sometimes called a viewfinder card, to isolate a section of a landscape before they sketch it. In the 18th century, landscape painters and tourists used the Claude glass, a slightly convex tinted mirror that shrank a sprawling view into a compact, framed image. Gonzalez's suggestion that newer shooters practice composing with their eyes alone, zooming and framing in their heads without a camera, sits in that same tradition. The crop mode on the Hasselblad has its own history, too. Hasselblad and Fujifilm released the original XPan in 1998, a rangefinder that exposed 24 x 65mm panoramic frames on ordinary 35mm film, and its look built a loyal following among street and landscape shooters. If you try this on your next trip, pick one constraint per outing rather than switching between all three. A morning committed to a single long focal length or a single aspect ratio forces your eye to adapt, and that adaptation is what carries over when you go back to shooting freely.

One morning, walking around the small town where he was staying, Gonzalez used the third method, an in-camera crop mode. On the Nikon Z6III, he shot with the square crop, and he flags a Nikon behavior you should know before relying on it. When you set a crop like 1:1 on that camera, the RAW file is cropped too, so the pixels outside the square are gone for good. Many other systems crop only the JPEG and keep the full sensor area in the RAW file, which leaves room to change your mind later. On the Hasselblad 907X & CFV 100C, he used the XPan mode, which chops off the top and bottom of the frame and leaves a long, cinematic strip to fill.

That XPan strip paid off at an old historic rail yard. With the vertical dimension mostly removed, Gonzalez could build images from left to right, catching one element on one side and another element across the frame, without trying to make every corner of the scene work at once. He describes it as noticing "there's something over there" and simply letting the wide shape hold both. After that, he started having fun and came away with photographs he was happier with.

The Vermont photographs Gonzalez brought home are in the video above.