Grand Old Cottonwood Tree. Denver, Colorado, 2012
This past week (on Thursday) was the monthly Colorado Nature Camera Club (CNCC) meeting. It’s a small, laid back and friendly group, and I always walk away with a few lessons learned–which I’ll pass on.
The format of the meeting is this…During the first few minutes, a member will give a very brief presentation about a particular animal, insect, place or theme (nature related, of course). Then, for the rest of that first hour we have a guest speaker, usually a photographer of some note from the local area. During the second hour, members present their images (either projected or in print form) and the guest speaker turns into the judge, giving a critique of each image along with a score.
The guest speaker for this meeting was Chris Brown, an accomplished nature photographer from Boulder. Chris has created images all over the West and has many, many years of experience hiking and river running in the Grand Canyon. You can check out his wonderful portfolio and extensive credentials at his web site here.
Chris, in his presentation and later during the critique session, had many interesting things to say, but there were four that stood out as great advice and/or reaffirmations of ideas that have been stewing in my mind for some time. To wit:
1) Seeing. One of the wonderful things about photography–and, perhaps, why many of us are attracted to it–is that it causes us to be much more observant of details and aware of our surroundings. We tend to “see” things in greater depth. If we are nature photographers, this greatly heightens our experience as we spend our time in that wonderful world of wind, sun, plants, and beasts (whether or not we ever press the shutter button!).
2) Critiques. One of the best things you can do to improve your photography is sit down with a more experienced photographer and spend some time critiquing your images. One interesting thing I personally noticed as Chris went through the process of critiquing our club photographs (and he was pretty honest, even harsh at times!) was that, many times, he would put words to what, to me, were just subtle feelings I would have about certain images. That is, although I could feel something was either right or wrong about what I saw, I wasn’t able to nail it down with words while he was able to verbalize it. My reaction was often, “Wow, that’s right! Why didn’t I see that? Why couldn’t I say that?”
3) Know your subject. This is an obvious axiom for photographers. The more you know your subject–whether it be a building, a city, a person, an animal, a bird, a mountain range, a river, or a canyon–the better you become at capturing its essence in your photographs. Two of my images that evening showed that I have a way to go…In one, I misidentified the tree in the image title (correctly titled above!), and in another I was unable to identify, when asked, the various peaks in a horizon panorama of the Indian Peaks Wilderness (see below). I should know my subjects better…it would help me to “see” a little deeper into them, understand their character, understand the light, the changing conditions.
4) Print your best images! Finally, Chris reaffirmed my belief that the real goal of a serious photographer is the fine art print. There is just something special about holding and admiring a physical object, like a photographic print…you feel the weight of the paper…you see very directly the luminosity, the tones, the colors. Just posting on the web is fine for some purposes, but the final act of the art of photography is the creation of a finely crafted archival print on the paper of your choice (it’s “the performance” as Ansel said). A photographer doesn’t have much control over how the millions of monitors across the web are calibrated, but he or she does have total control of the photographic print. Chris is a master printer in this sense and is yet another photographer with whom I need to spend some time to help me perfect this essential skill.
Western Horizons. Boulder County, Colorado, 2012
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