A photographer friend wrote us recently, frustrated at being in a photo rut. I wrote him back the following, “I have an exercise for you. Go out to some nearby location, and make one perfect image. This will force you to previsualize what you want from the image. You can compose and recompose, change your lens, your viewpoint, your intended treatment, but only make that one image. I think that sometime in the excitement of a location, we don’t take the time to make that beautiful image…

Last week, I wrote about Same Place – Different View. One of our students thought it would be neat to see some students’ work using the same theme. Great idea, Sandy! Here it is!

Please note, we have not tampered with the images; they are exactly as given to us in class. Some may not have had a chance to work on their final processing, but it is the approach and vision that counts here, not the finishing touch. Some may wonder why their versions of the scene were not included. We can’t include ones that weren’t submitted for the slide show, and we will not use ones that aren’t labeled with the photographers’ names! After all, we want to give due credit.

In the mountains of western Virginia, one of the places we have gone has a wonderful old snake fence, so popular in the early days of this area. Also known as Virginia fence, Virginia rail fence, or worm fence, these sturdy fences are seen following hillside contours. In this example…

You have heard us and others say that if you put a whole group of photographers in the same location, you will get a whole bunch of different shots. The question is, are they all variations of the same shot, or are they unique? Here are a few examples of shots Arnie and I did. You can see that we each approached the subject or location creatively, and we definitely found our own vision. Sometimes, we stood in nearly the same place. Often, our approach was totally different. Sometimes, we are attracted to the same scene, but we envisioned it at a different time of day…