I don't like photographing fall colors (or do I)
I have a secret.
My secret is…
I don’t like shooting fall colors.
What, you say.
I really don’t. It’s not my thing. I like looking at fall colors. I enjoy looking at photos of fall colors, but I don’t like photographing fall colors.
How very unlike a landscape photographer, you think.
So true, but I don’t like shooting fall colors.
If someone called me up and asked if I wanted to go out shooting fall colors, I’d probably say, no. It’s really hard for me to get motivated this time of year to get out my camera, jump in my car and search out fall colors to photograph. I’d much rather watch TV, listen to music, write something, build something, mow the lawn, do the end-of-the-summer yard work. Anything but shooting fall colors.
So, I have to force myself to go out searching for fall color. I have to because I’m a photographer. I have to because it is expect of a landscape photographer to put fall color photos into their calendar. My 2024 Northern Landscape Calendar is coming out towards the end of October.
Last year, I actually started to like shooting fall colors, and I finally felt like I had gotten over this quirk I have. But, that didn’t take. I still don’t like shooting fall colors.
But…
I do like shooting water, waterfalls, streams, lakes, overlooks, swamps, trees and a broad subject matter. Sometimes those things, such as lakes, are surrounded by fall color.
And guess what? I like shooting those things even with fall color surrounding them. The fall color can make the things I like to shoot look different and sometimes cool.
The way I look at this this year is that shooting fall colors is this overly broad and amorphous subject. What someone says, let’s go shoot some fall color, I don’t feel like that’s a real subject. It’s a color. For me a color is more often a compositional element to use in a way to make the composition, as Weston said, “the strongest way of seeing.” While it can be a subject, for me it rarely is.
But, when it is part of a subject that I love to shoot it becomes just a compositional element that I can use to let my viewers know what I was shooting. If I use that compositional element simply, it can tell the viewer the time of year. If it’s a warmer color, like most fall color, I can use it to create an inviting scene that’s warm and makes you feel happy.
I can use it as a compositional element that directs the viewer’s eyes through the photo from where I want them to first look to where I want them to stop looking, and if I want them to repeat that motion, I can use it that way, too.
Also, I can use fall color in a way that ties all the parts of the photo together, like a good rug ties the room together.
So, I don’t like shooting fall colors, but I do love shooting other subjects. If fall color surrounds those subject, I don’t mind shooting it. It becomes another compositional element — a color in a photographer’s pallette.
In that way, I like fall color.
Until next time
And that’s a wrap. Are there things that you don’t like to shoot? If so, maybe stop thinking about them as the subject and start thinking about them as a compositional element. If you don’t like to shoot something, let me know in the comments (just writing that you don’t like to shoot weddings doesn’t count :) ).
I hope you enjoyed this issue of my newsletter. I hope to see you again in two weeks, but I may miss the next issue depend on how things go on a 10-day trip I’m about to leave on. If I’m slower than I anticipate, it may be three weeks. I hope I’ll be back in time to keep the schedule and share photos from the trip.
Before I forget, here’s my shameless self promo: My Photo Workshops. For former and current photo workshop participants, I’d be curious if you have any suggestions for workshops that I should run in the future. Let me know.
Bryan, I think it would be fun to have a workshop with an “assignment”, contrived as it may be, to focus our work and for our critique session. It could be shoot as if you were doing a Grand Marais visitor bureau handout and you need 10 images. Or big and small—for each vista or landscape, shoot one macro or one abstract that also illustrates that place from your pov. Have us think about the story we want to tell. And maybe do the critique a week after the workshop so we could carefully get through our images and present something cohesive.
I once did a philanthropic workshop in Alaska, where the photographer leaders had partnered with two non-profits that needed images for their website and marketing tools.
They didn’t have a professional photographer in their budget. We met with each non-profit, learned about their mission, generated broad shot ideas and donated our images at the end (chosen by the workshop leaders). The organizations were the Tongans National Forest, which was trying to rebrand itself from the industry of forestry to that of the salmon industry. The second was the Sitka Raptor
Society. It was really fun to explore the area with a focused eye for these organizations and felt
really good to support their mission. Plus we got to see owls up close! That would be cool to do in northern Minnesota.
I’d also be interested in a south shore of Lake Superior workshop. I don’t know that area at all, but I’d guess it has appealing landacape, quite similar to north shore.
Jenny Crouch