Barrel Cactus 12/03/2011
Often, Nature provides a wealth of subjects to photograph. The problem is that they are arranged according to Nature’s rules and may not readily fit into a human composition.
This photo is an example of such a situation. There were a number of objects in the frame that appealed to me but all of them did not belong in the composition.
I put my camera aside and looked at the scene. What attracted me the most: distant mountains, teddy bear or jumping cholla in the background, barrel cactus in the foreground, the texture of desert hard-pan, the light, or some combination?
My eyes kept focusing on the barrel cactus in the foreground. I decided that was my primary subject. Next, I decided that I needed the distant mountains. Lastly, I wanted to show the texture of the desert hard-pan.
Using those three objects as a guide, I then used my 3-templates rule of thumb. There are three quick choices that I can make, one of which will get me in the ball park.
- Go Wide – Use a wide angle view to capture all the subjects. This is the landscape approach. The chosen subjects are to be the object of interest in the expanse of the desert.
- Go Halfway — Compose the frame using the all selected subjects. This the view that Nature presented me initially and that I have cropped more closely.
- Go Close — This is the micro photographic approach. Pick out the primary object, pick the outstanding aspect of the subject, for instance the yellow fruit on the top of the cactus, and work with that. This way I can discard the other elements and simplify the composition.
I looked at the scene using the wide and halfway views. Changing views adds more perspective to what I’m looking at and, often, unseen relationships emerge. If I’m still struggling then I go close to see what is there.
In the case of the Barrel Cactus I found a happy medium. While studying the scene, I discovered that there was a structure. It is a Z. The upper horizontal line is made of the cholla, the bottom horizontal line is made from the small bushes in the foreground, and the diagonal line going from upper right to lower left is made of barrel cactus (mid and foreground) and a bush. The bare ground to the left of the diagonal and to the lower right help to emphasize the shape.
The Z is an interesting shape because it mimics how people who are trained to read western scripts (English, French, etc.) look at a page or picture. Our eyes start in the upper left corner, traverse to the right then sweep diagonally to the lower left corner and then across to the lower right.
For western viewers, the Z eye movement reinforces my composition.
Another way to reinforce the composition is to adjust the color and contrast of the cactus and bushes, making them stand out more from the desert hard-pan and the mountains. I decided not to because I liked the existing dusty patina and colors of the image.