The Photographer's Eye

Praying Tree

Seen on an old highway in southwest Georgia.

CanonEOS 5D Classic, Canon 70-200 f4L lens

 

What does it mean to have a photographer's eye?

I think the indispensable ability is the ability to notice things. 

After that comes a sense of light. Very often, it's the light itself that makes a subject noticeable. Learn to study light -- observe how it falls at different times of the day and different seasons of the year until you can almost feel the way it works with your subject. This is a lifelong learning process and I'm still working at it.

The third element is composition -- the ability to arrange the subject in the camera's viewfinder so that whatever it is that caught your eye stands forth most clearly. If necessary, zoom your lens or move, so that your frame is clean and uncluttered, including only the essential elements that tell the story.

Good street photographers such as Erwitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson have an almost magical ability to simultaneously notice both a subject and the light and compose a photograph in an instant. Others, myself included, are not so fast. But not all kinds of photography demand such quick reflexes. Jay Maisel notices and photographs an incredible number of interesting subjects. Some of them do demand quick reflexes, but many of them are just sitting there, as it were, waiting for someone to notice and photograph them.

As Robert Louis Stevenson said,

             "The world is so full of a number of things                                                                              I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

Photograph and text copyright 2021, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone