Give your eyes a destination and a route to get there. Our job as artists is to find a place we want to direct the viewer’s eye to, find a way to direct them there, and then to show them what it is we want them to see. Everything else is just visual clutter.
Photographers are often interested in holding and controlling depth of field. In fact, there is even a very cool-sounding term for being out of focus: bokeh. And when I first saw the term in “Peterson’s Photographic Magazine” many years ago, I thought maybe they confused the word, and it was referring to a floral arrangement.
And while holding great depth of field for sharpness—and I have—there is for me a bigger question. And that is, “What about depth of interest?”
As we consider landscape photographs, the question comes up: Why is one landscape photograph successful, drawing the interest of the viewer and making it more than just another “pretty picture”? In my view, there might be several things to take into consideration. As I write this, it occurs to me that there are probably a hundred or more factors that go into the equation of what it is that serves to make a photograph visually interesting. Many are intangible, maybe even subliminal, and they often happen without the photographer’s conscious thought or understanding. I do know that I hardly ever give conscious thought to these factors; they are more an instinctive emotional response rather than a conscious checklist I go through. In fact, I can say that I don’t remember ever going through these at a conscious level. And yet, when I look at the preliminary image, either on my light table, as a contact proof print, or in Lightroom, they are there.
So if I were able to figure those things out and quantify them, it might improve my ability to create the memorable images that I set out to do. Having said that, here are some suggestions.
Foreground may be the most important interest zone in a photograph, especially if the image is to be a portrait or portrayal of the landscape. As I look at landscape photographs, what is the thing that draws me into the photograph and makes me want to look at it? For me, it often is the foreground. I usually gravitate to the photograph that has strong foreground interest. Indeed, I see so many images where the initial interest of the photographer is very clearly something in the far distance—perhaps a mountain range, an interesting cloud structure, or a grove of interesting trees. Sadly, the life of the image stops there because the foreground is foundational to the image. And if there is no foundation, then the image has little or nothing to stand on or to have as its base.
So what are the things that cause the foreground to be interesting? First of all, it has to be sharp—or at least give the impression of being sharp. I want to see a pattern of some sort. Maybe the texture of the foliage or of the sandstone or beach rocks. Any number of things can lend texture to the foreground. In this image, my buddy was wanting to bug out, but I saw something in the foreground that I was interested in: the texture of the Mormon tea against the red rock sandstone, with the one-seed juniper on the edge of the abyss. (For those interested, I used a #58 dark green filter stacked with a linear polarizer to give the effect of infrared film. At some point in the near future, I will write about how I use filters in my black and white work. I am working on the article, but it is not fleshed out yet.) But above all else, it has to be sharp. Movement is another element I like to add to my foregrounds.
I don't live near the ocean, so being able to be there is an absolute treat. I was really wanting a lot of movement in the foreground of my image. However, for a novice ocean watcher like me, it is extremely unpredictable, and to a degree, each photograph here is a crapshoot. Maybe it'll work, maybe not. However, in this case, the movement of the water painted in almost exactly what I wanted. I think I did six sheets of film here, which is one full film holder; I use Grafmatic film holders, by the way. Out of those six, one was very good—this one—one is a maybe, and the other four didn't work at all for me.
Next is the midground. The midground portion of the image is the part of the image that connects the foreground to the background. This space is not always clearly defined; however, it is there, and since it is there, it needs to be addressed.
When I made this image, I was leading a workshop program that I used to teach out of Page, Arizona. It had rained almost continuously from the first day of the workshop, and I decided we would pull up stakes and go to Zion National Park, which is about 100 miles to the west. I called a motel I was familiar with in Springdale, Utah, and they had enough rooms available. The first day we were there, the storm began breaking up about mid-morning, so we moved up-canyon to a location I was familiar with that wasn’t too far off the road. The foreground was covered with prickly pear cactus, with the Gambel’s oak trees in the midground appearing to bow inward in front of the Court of the Patriarchs, with a very dramatic clearing storm over them.
This image, Hot Mushroom Rocks Under a Big Sky, was created one late April afternoon. A buddy of mine and I had gone to Canyonlands for a week of photography and camping. I had endured heart surgery late in the summer before, and against the advice of my doctor and the better judgment of my wife, I scheduled a long backpacking expedition with a buddy from Santa Fe. This image connects the foreground salt pattern with the midground and leads to the object of main concern—the mushroom-shaped rocks—with the sky as a supporting element. It was done around late morning, and maybe the memorable thing for me was that it was so hot with billions of tiny, bitey bugs.
Often the reason for making a photograph in the first place is what’s in the background, with the foreground and midground as supporting elements designed to lead the viewer’s eye to it. Many times, what’s in the foreground is interesting enough to carry the image. An example might be an instance where we photograph a close-up of a detail. For instance, I was high up in the mountains above Crested Butte, Colorado, and oddly enough, it was absolutely dead calm. These little columbines were tucked under a small ledge. In this type of image, everything is foreground. At least, the image front to back is very shallow, so everything in the image is what would be called the foreground
Very often, what’s in the background is the whole reason for stopping to make the photograph in the first place. In this instance, I was very attracted to the mountain range in the background, Red Rock National Preserve, Nevada. There were a bunch of yucca trees, as well as sotol and other types of desert flora, in the foreground. I used the streaking light from a desert sunrise to highlight the mountains in the background. Usually, the elements don’t stand solely on their own, and it is necessary to have other supporting actors that anchor the main subject and lead the viewer’s eyes to the main subject.
The foreground and midground acted as a sort of funnel to direct the eye to the cliffs in the background. The sky is another factor here, which I will discuss in a future writing. So the basic elements of interest are the foreground, midground, and background. The smart use of them, and paying close attention to what’s in them, can be tools used to create the landscape photographs we have always wanted to create.
(By the way, the image at the head of the article is called Below the Rim, Moonset at Sunrise. I did it to see if it were possible to do an HDR-type image using large format film. I made four exposures on four separate pieces of film—one at two stops over, one at one stop over (both for shadow detail), one at normal exposure to hold midtones, and one at one stop under to hold detail in the sky. Each chrome was scanned using an Epson V750 scanner at 100% with no cropping of the film pieces and no adjustments to exposure or the histogram before they were scanned. The images were then opened in Photoshop, and Photoshop’s Merge to HDR was used to combine them into one image. I am reasonably happy with the results, though I wouldn’t do it that way again. Each image was made using a Toyo 45A camera, 65mm Sinaron lens with a UV-15 filter, and Kodak E100G film.)
Once again, I suggest using B&H Photo Video.
And BTW, in the image of the mountain range at Red Rock National Preserve, I arrived there at about 0400 and was greeted by a herd of wild burros. That was a wild experience, the wind was howling at maybe 45+MPH. I parked my Bronco in such a way that it provided a sort of wind break.