Sometimes a Struggle Results in a Story (and a Lesson Learned)

Since we’re more than 10 days in to the new year, it seems inappropriate to make a post comparing the old with the coming new, doesn’t it? However, I can’t let my belated first post of 2012 go without some due diligence to 2011. Last year was a good year. Good in the sense that I stayed busy and had some of the most impacting and awesome life experiences I’ll ever have. Our first child was born (I could stop there and be completely happy with how the year–and subsequently the rest of my life–went), I wrote my first book, Storytellers, for a great publisher and an even greater audience (thanks to each and every one of you that have and are showing interest in not only my book, but the more important issue and occupation of visual storytelling), I had another great year of teaching an engaging set of students at Texas Tech University and at the university’s center in Seville, Spain, and I had enough assignment work to keep me from tending my blog regularly (but I can’t argue with the amount of work and the great people with which I share it). That being said, 2011 was a good year. 2012, I don’t expect anything less out of you.

I do want to make a point with this post, though. More of an observation and a call for similar reflection on your part. I photographed the tree above during the Christmas holiday we spent on my family’s cattle ranch in Paradise, Texas (yes, there is a Paradise, Texas, as well as a Utopia, Texas–both wonderful places but in two very different regions of the state). Every time I’m back home, I try to get out for a couple days of shooting. Several years back, I shot a small book on the ranch during summer time, and I still publish the images I took that year of cattle on rolling hillsides, kid goats playing with each other, and even portraits of my grandparents. Photography allows me to become reacquainted with a place I knew well growing up, but in a very different and new way.

However, the shot above was a bit…tough, for lack of better words. Not tough to shoot–the dog walking along with me could have made it if he’d just had opposable thumbs and an attention span longer than, well, a dog. Tough in that I struggled with deriving meaning from this shot. I still am to be honest. But there’s something oddly attractive to me about the shot.

Meadows Ranch is a pretty place, even in the winter. It ought to be for as much care my grandfather puts in to keeping it clean. I can’t tell you how many hundreds of acres my cousin and I combed when we were younger, hacking invasive weeds and picking up fallen branches and rocks that had sat in a pasture for Lord knows how long. And the trees, the pecans and oaks, are the perfect ranch trees. Large canopies for the cattle, and many of them symmetrical enough that when winter rolls around and the trees go into dormancy, they’re seemingly just as nice looking as when they’re fully clothed.

One day a couple weeks back, I went out on a walk around a pasture south of my parents’ home, and at the end of the trek, I turned my photographic intent toward a couple well placed trees on a hillside. The sun was literally a minute or two away from completely resigning for the day, and the only area of the subject matter at hand that was lit with that ultra-warm light was the branches. The blue in the sky was vibrant and the wood glowed bright orange while the greens in the grass stood out enough to play well with the other colors. I shot several different compositions of the tree–horizontals, verticals, a lot of foreground, very little foreground, tree along the right and left hand third lines, etc.

Something, though, just wasn’t working. There was something more visceral in how I was seeing this tree. The tree is well balanced, and I felt the shot needed to be symmetrical. We’ve all heard that you have to learn the rules to break them, and this was certainly one of those times. For me, the best way for this image to speak was to place the tree right dab in the center. Well, there goes my double-truck spread in the next issue of the greatest magazine in the world. What will my students think about this image after I just gave them the lecture on using the Rule of Thirds? Regardless of the publishing possibilities of this image, or the perception of relatively new and well-meaning interpretation of such an image, in my mind’s eye, and in respect to the tree’s story, I had to break the rules. I had to place it in the center.

Editing the images later, I was still struggling. I liked the composition, and I especially like the color treatment after adjusting the usual contrast levels. However, I wasn’t convinced about finalizing the image. I’m not one for black and white. There are many, MANY people out there that do black and white way better than me (I’m always working on it, though–I just LOVE color). But this image, this barren, symmetrical tree and subsequent frame said black and white. Again, a visceral feeling of the image’s content and the frame itself. Part of my vision for the image, if you will, in conjunction with the story of the tree and land itself. Black and white sure seems to tell the winter more strongly in the frame. Black and white does say something in this frame that color did not.

In the end, I’m happy with the shot. It’s not the best image ever made. It’s simply a dormant oak tree patiently waiting for spring to arrive. However, the struggling with the frame, to get it to a point to where it says something about the winter it’s living through now and the drought it just endured, in the end resulted in one that in my mind speaks more to myself and to others in a similar way. Of course, once it’s out of my hands (and on the Internet in this case), the interpretation is completely up for grabs.

Struggling with your image making, I believe, is not an all-the-time necessity for making storytelling images, no matter how much of it you should have when creating art (another subject, another time, I suppose). However, I do believe it is something we all endure at many various points in our work as photographers. I hope I continue to struggle at times with creating images that tell a story (particularly new areas of the visual world in which I’ve yet to delve), and if they tell a slightly different story to everyone that sees them, then at least they’re doing that. In the same sense, I hope you too experience this struggling. Sometimes it comes in the form of not feeling creative for long amounts of time, or when the gear, technique, and vision just aren’t complementing each other. However, just as a world-class athlete becomes such, working through and sometimes with these frequently frustrating times and experiences leaves us better photographers and visual storytellers.

So, here’s to 2012. Happy New Year, happy photographing, enjoy your storytelling this year, and if you hit a bump in the creative and communicative process, work through it, learn from it, and become a better storyteller from the experience.

Thanks again for all your support! More to come!