Making Great Images Takes Time

Making Great Images Takes Time

by William Lulow

Here’s a thought, with an explanation, about making those great images we love. It takes time! The backstory is that I was out in Wyoming photographing the Grand Tetons last summer. I saw an image in my mind of the majestic mountains with part of the Snake River in the foreground. My inspiration, of course was the famous scene Ansel Adams made in roughly the same spot back in 1942, but I didn’t wish to duplicate it exactly, which I couldn’t do anyway since there were eighty intervening years and two different photographers. I didn’t know exactly where I would need to position the camera, so I drove onto several dirt roads off the main road in Grand Teton National Park. The first led to a parking lot with a number of cars already there. I parked, grabbed the camera and tripod with my filters and took off down the trail. I wasn’t thinking about having to hike very far, but I could see that the view I had really didn’t include the part of the river that I wanted, so I just turned around without taking any images and headed back to the car. I put all the equipment back and started off for the next dirt road, which was just a little bit further down the main road. I pulled off onto that road and eventually found another parking lot, with fewer cars this time. I parked, grabbed the equipment again and started walking along the trail. I finally found the water I was looking for, set up the camera but didn’t really like the angle. I picked up the tripod with the camera on it and moved a bit closer to the water. I lowered the camera to catch the river in the foreground. I was shooting with my 20mm f/2.8 lens which is a slight wide-angle for my camera. That was the shot I wanted. I made several exposures with a variety of filters, packed up everything and headed back to the car.

The actual shooting maybe took five minutes to complete. So all the time searching for the right spot, making some adjustments in exposure, etc., collecting the right equipment (lenses, etc.), that’s what took the time. And, of course, thinking about the image I wanted and how, exactly, I was going to do it. The shooting really took almost no time at all. Here is the shot:

Now after the image was captured it still required some work. But I knew I had a photograph that I could work with and that represented how I felt about the majesty of the mountains and the spot I had picked. It was just about identical to the shot I had in mind when I began my search. I knew I wanted the water to be a major focal point in the image and here was the spot where I could achieve that. I could capture the mountains with an interesting foreground treatment that added to the natural quality I wanted.

In one of the recent blog articles in this space I talked about “access” as a necessary element to getting really great images. This effort was all about access. As I said, the shooting took less time than the thinking about it. And that’s as it should be. Once you decide on an image and the type of picture you want, getting it is the hardest part of the process. Knowing how to expose the image with the proper settings is also a relatively small part of the process – a necessary step, but one that we assume any competent photographer can achieve. The thing that sets the photograph apart from just a snapshot is the thought behind it and the idea to create it in the first place. That’s what takes the time. The execution of recording an image these days is much simpler than it used to be in the days of film. 

Back then, we had to shoot scenes like this with large view cameras and sheets of film. The cameras were heavier and therefore needed sturdier and larger tripods to support them. With view cameras, like Ansel Adams used, you had to set the camera up and view the ground glass with a dark cloth over your head and, the image was upside down and backward! But we got used to it and it became second nature after a while.

Today, technology has made acquiring the image much easier, but it’s the thought, consideration and the knowledge to figure out how to get the access needed that takes the time.

The image was then subjected to quite a bit of post-processing including the addition of clouds which were part of my thought process but were not there on the day I made the original. This has become another dominant part of the photographic process, just as it always was. Most of Adams’ finest images were made with a fair amount of extra work in the darkroom AFTER the initial image was captured. So, it’s not that much different today except that now everything is done on the computer.

Here is another example:

This was a spectacular sunset in Hampton Bays, New York and even though the bright orange color was there, it needed to be modified slightly by using the SATURATION filter in Photoshop to make it just a bit more intense. When I saw the sky, I knew it would be an image that I could work with to bring out that orange tone even more than what existed in nature.

There is almost no limit to the things you can do with images given today’s technology. The main thing is to have some kind of vision of what you want your images to look like and then develop the skills and patience to turn them into beautiful pictures.