Blog #179 Variations on a theme (aka working the scene)
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📷 Amateur
In this week’s blog post, I want to share some thoughts (and images) pertaining to the topic of working the scene. Interestingly, while most world famous and successful photographers were made famous by a handful of images only. Upon further inspection, many of these men and woman worked the scene. Their stellar images were rarely a one and done sort of event.
Magnum Contact Sheets is a book that has contact sheets from many photographers from Magnum so that you can have a peek into their workflow. If you’re not sure what a contact sheet is, read about it.
One great habit to get into when making images of just about any type and wherever possible is to work the scene. This is a simple process of S-L-O-W-I-N-G-D-O-W-N and making multiple images of a single scene, subject, or whatever you happen to be pointing your lens at. How many images do you need to shoot? A few. What’s “a few”? It means more than one. Try three, five, or whatever floats your boat.
Later, you will pick the BEST ONE! But don’t stop there. Try some different post processing techniques to tweak the image even further. Try colour, cyanotype, black and white, high contrast, low contrast, and other techniques to change the image until you love it. Imaging that you’re cooking soup. You add salt, then pepper, then more spices until it taste good to you.
Try this technique next time you are out shooting. You will most likely come home with a few images of the same subject and/or scene and one will be better than the others. Use that one. Then edit and edit again and again until you refine the image to perfection or close to it. This is what the Magnum guys do. You might find some great images that work.
You can browse some of my prints in Photato’s Print Lab.
The light is always right.
JHG
*Images: © Limelight Limited
Where: Stanley, Hong Kong
Subject: Landscapes, Seascapes
Gear: Leica Q2 Summilux 28mm f/1.7 ASPH.
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