Tying It All Together
A coastal brown bear devours a sockeye salmon during the height of the salmon run. Photo and text by Annalise Kaylor.
How we express ourselves through layers of light, color, and composition is our visual vocabulary. As beginner photographers, our visual vocabulary is limited to basic concepts that, over time, take on new contexts. As we grow and that vocabulary develops into more specific and thoughtful means of communication, our visual storytelling is deeper, richer, and more gratifying.
How we see and express ourselves through light and color and dimension is a constant, ever-evolving exercise. It’s precisely why Jared and I can sit mere inches apart in front of the same animal, in the same light, even with the same length of lens and create entirely different photographs with our entirely different visual vocabularies. My photographic umwelt is vastly different than his, which is vastly different than yours. None of them is better than the other, just different. And thank goodness for that, right?
Regardless of our differences, we all share the common goal of expressing ourselves through photography. We are in pursuit of what we call “high moment value.”
“Moment value” is a way that we describe how dimensional any given photograph is. Dimensionality comes from continuously expanding your visual vocabulary, braiding together your why, your style, and all of the technical elements of photography into your work. To say a photograph has “high moment value” is to say that the photo has a truly rich and unique experience layered within that one single frame. And, regardless of what avenue of the business of photography you are most exploring—stock photography, fine art, magazines, and publications—the photos with high moment value qualities are the ones that sell time and time again.
Moment value is not defined so much by getting a shot that features something cool or unique in the frame as much as it is defined by your ability to use your skills to communicate why this photo is unique and interesting without saying a word. If you have to verbally explain or justify your photo to get your point across - it’s not a good photo.
If you think of your photographs as music, then the goal isn’t the ringing clarity of one single note. Rather, it’s about creating a chord that makes the one single note resonate better and more beautiful than it ever could on its own. This helps a photo move beyond the informational into the transformational.
We don’t have control over wildlife. No one is behind the subalpine fir saying, “Okay, cue the moose to enter from stage left, Jane…” But we do have control over how we create moment value from the colors, the light, the subject, the composition, and the layers we weave into the scene as we freeze that moment in time.
Surely you can think of photographs you have seen (or made) many times over and every time you see them, they present the same emotion and magical feeling as they did the first time. These are photographs with a high moment value, and we all pursue them with every outing. Maybe you have even looked at your own work and you knew one photo was better than the others, but you couldn’t really put your finger on why you felt that way. Likely, it had a high moment value.
So how do we go about increasing the moment value in our work? We expand our visual vocabulary.
When we first start out with a camera in our hands we focus on “getting” the photo. We “shoot” photos, as if our capabilities are limited to “I see animal, I shoot animal.” Eventually, we challenge ourselves to try a technique or tool that is new to us, and we grow a bit more. We communicate a bit more clearly.
When you’ve arrived at the point that you have a defined “why,” you look at the entire scene differently - what are you responding to? What is the important message to convey? What can I say with my photograph that speaks to the people viewing it?
Our intention and our dimension as photographers rely on so many things coming together at the right moment. We, as humans, see in stereo vision. What we take in as we navigate this world has depth and fullness around it because of that. As we look around, objects are separated from their background and everything has a shape. Our eyes see from two points simultaneously. Our world is layers upon layers upon layers.
Our camera and our lens, though, see from a one-eyed perspective. The camera relies on how light falls on our subjects. It relies on our composition and our use of light, shadow, color, and other elements to create dimension in photographs. Our eyes are basically set to P for Program, while our camera needs us to determine the settings that bring life and dimension into a single frame.
It’s easy to see things like light and color and depth of field as the elements that introduce dimension to our work, but there is another one I’d like you to consider. I hadn’t sat down to think critically about this dimension, but my photo editor at my agency paid me a wonderful compliment about my first round of photo submissions - my use of “distance” as voice is strong and well-developed.
Distance is a dimension we must consider when we study composition and impact. It has the potential to make as much impact as any other facet of our work. Photographers often approach distance as something of a reflex, “I have to be this far away because I need to SHOW what I’m photographing.”
When we default to thinking that “this distance is as far as I can go,” we operate on a default mode which means we create photos on a default mode. Can you imagine if we had to watch movies this way? All shot from the distance in which every character or subject fit into the whole frame and all the activity took place in this wide angle that merely shows what is happening? We’d be bored out of our minds and there would be no way to emotionally connect with any of the characters, let alone the story being told.
Yet, time after time, I watch as still photographers stay trapped in this cycle of “coloring inside the lines.” To be clear, I’m not talking about safety considerations or obeying rules and regulations. I’m talking about situations where photographers are simply content to stand in this one spot, where everyone else has always stood, to make the photo every other photographer has made.
With this perpetual “middle distance” approach, there is no risk and thus, little to no reward. If, when looking at your photos, the subject of your photo is almost always the element in the photo that is closest to your camera, then you are likely creating photos that are simply informational. This is the first thing I look for when I’m doing a portfolio review for other photographers. This alone tells me almost everything I need to know about the experience level of the photographer. Photographers who have a lot of images with the subject as the first thing in the frame almost always have the subject centered, too. And, we all know that composition is far more evolved beyond simply obeying the rule of thirds or centering a subject.
My friend Mike, who was a longtime photo editor at NatGeo and was a visuals director under two different administrations in the White House, calls this a “plywood approach.” This is where all of the important elements of the photo exist in just one layer of the photo frame. If you look closely, you can see the whole is made up of individual contributing pieces. But there isn’t any depth to the individuality of those pieces so all you can really see is the whole, which is underwhelming.
If you want to rise above the cliché, you need to take some visual risks with your work and you need to study the work of our antecedents. Why do cliché photos become so successful? Because someone at some point in time deemed a photo “good” and then popular culture just kept repeating that “good” image until it became nothing more than a cookie-cutter template that drove the thinking, “Well, if I make a similar photo of the same thing, then it, too, is a good photo.”
There is no unique voice in the cliché. There is no YOU in the cliché.
I can’t even begin to tell you how many hours I’ve spent at libraries looking through photo books and studying the work of photographers I most admire. Look with a critical and thoughtful eye at photos that are similar in scene or subject to what you enjoy photographing:
Why is this photo deemed successful?
What about this photo is engaging?
Where are the layers?
How was it composed?
How does the lighting create impact?
Looking at the light, where was the photographer standing to make this image?
What elements of composition are priorities in this photo?
What is the mood of the image and how does that make me react as a viewer?
Now do the same for some of your photographs. Is there a difference? Are there similarities? Pull up photos from a recent shoot or a collection of images you consider your favorite. Put your finger in the middle of the image as you scroll through them. See how far and how often the subject of your photo moves aware from your finger. If it doesn’t move very often, then you’re not really composing your photographs with intention, you’re photographing everything similarly.
Go out and use what you have learned from this exercise and see how it impacts the way you see and interpret your stereo world through your Cyclops camera.
You are the photographs you make. Your photographs are you. You’re the one factor in your work that you control entirely. If you are warm and playful, your photos follow suit. If you are cautious and reserved, it will show in your photography, too. Personality plays out in every way in our photography - how you engage, how you approach a subject or topic, and what you convey. This is the secret sauce. This is how you sell your work. If you remember from the piece on finding your why, “people don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it.”
I don’t think that there is a photographer out there who hopes their photography elicits a reaction such as, “Wow, the photographer did a really great job fixing everything in post!” Technical proficiency is a piece of the puzzle, but it is who you are and what you do that takes your work to new heights.
We work within one of the most saturated and highly competitive genres of photography. It’s not enough to be solely informational. It’s not realistic to expect that a pretty photo with no “why” behind it will sell. Subject matter alone does not sell photos any more than someone’s use of Topaz Denoise will be the differentiator that makes someone buy a photo.
Anyone can become technically proficient.
Only you decide what you’re going to say.