On Foregrounds

I learned a valuable lesson 20-odd years ago.  This was back in my incipient days of approaching landscape photography seriously.  I spent a few days poking around Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, during which time I photographed many impressive views from some of the numerous overlooks that abut the park’s Skyline Drive.  I had high expectations of receiving many wonderful images when I picked up the film from the developer (yes, this was back in the film era), but upon doing so I was extremely discouraged.  The images were, virtually without exception, highly disappointing and reflected almost literally none of the excitement I felt when I was in the field.

It took me a little while to figure out what went wrong–or at least part of what went wrong–but I finally managed to sort it out.  I’d fallen into a trap that catches a lot of photographers:  a tendency to shoot with a wide angle lens in an open place, with little or no consideration of the importance of the foreground.

Icefields Parkway Afternoon, Jasper National Park, Alberta

I’ve discussed the (counterintuitive) matter of photographing with telephoto lenses in wide open places before, but have never taken the time to delve in depth into a more common scenario:  wide angles in broad locales.  This has been an oversight on my part because it’s under such circumstances that a clear majority of photographers are most inclined to reach for the wide angle lens.

Cape Royal, Grand Canyon National Park – North Rim, Arizona

The problem with my Shenandoah experience can be essentially summarized in the following few sentences:

“Oh, wow…look at all that great stuff out there.  I want to include all of it!  How can I do that?  A wide angle lens!”

Bear Rocks Sunrise, Dolly Sods Wilderness, Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia

Let’s ignore, for the moment, the I-want-to include-all-of-it-as-an-inherently-desirable-thing part of the above quote.  (That may be the subject of a future post.)  Including “everything” in a situation like the one I’m describing means the presence of a lot of background.  And one of the aspects of using a wide angle lens that’s inescapable is:  distant objects will appear smaller to the camera than they do the naked eye.  The farther away they are and the wider the focal length, the smaller background objects will appear; that’s  a simple property of optics.  And so, if the attraction to the wide angle lens is “all that great stuff” way out there…well, it’s going to be a whole lot less prominent in your photograph than it is to your eye.

Pacific Coast, Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park, California

And that’s what happened with those Shenandoah images–all the “great stuff” was minimized.  There were all these interesting, but tiny, objects in the distance which were dwarfed, in terms of importance by…well, by very little of any interest, because I’d given little or no attention to the things in the frame that were going to appear comparatively large:  collectively speaking, the foreground.

Virgin River, Zion Canyon, Zion National Park, Utah

There are a number of ways to get out of this conundrum.  One is to emphasize those interesting background elements by using a longer focal length; doing so will make them more prominent in the frame.  And another option is to…well, pay careful attention to the foreground, with the understanding that doing so is going to fundamentally change the nature of the image.  (If you’re of the mind that determining the best choice might be a function of deciding the nature of the real center of interest of the image, give yourself a hearty pat on the back.  Maybe we’ll discuss this at greater depth in another post.)  And if you still want to choose that wide angle to capture that wide open place–and that’s not necessarily the wrong option–you’re going to want to start being highly conscious of your foreground options.

Two Jack Lake Sunrise, Banff National Park, Alberta