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!

Every couple of weeks or so I’m going to start featuring an image I pull from the archive that, for lack of a better way to say it, excites me and one that harkens special meaning for me. I’m calling this portfolio of sorts Finding Favorites, because each time I go through my files for stock or assignment purposes, film or digital, I can’t help to stop at these and think back to the time, place, weather, song I was listening to, or whatever else it was that I remember so well from that particular moment and what made it unique enough to produce a nice image. Part of being a visual communicator is awareness of your own experiences prior to and during a shoot, and these are those experiences I hope to illustrate while describing the shots in this series!

I’m going to start out with a shot I made several years ago when all I was shooting was film. My pride and joy at the time, gear-wise, was an EF 17-35mm f/2.8L lens, and I shot with it all the time…all the time. I would walk around everywhere carrying an EOS 1N body with this lens attached, a loaded roll of Fujichrome Velvia 100, and I was set! I really learned what using an ultra-wide angle lens was all about, and I even (shh…don’t tell everyone this) shot portraits with it. This is probably why I’m such a fan of shooting environmental portraits nowadays. The best thing about the lens: it’s still doing its job. There’s not one single thing wrong with it, I’m still using it, and I don’t have any reason to replace it with the newer EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L II.

Aside from what I enjoyed shooting with the most at that time, I was more into what I was actually shooting in terms of content. This particular image features my brother, Seth, walking across a lake dam on the North Central Texas ranch where we were raised, The Meadows Ranch. We spent a good deal of time fishing on two of the three small lakes less than a mile from the house. When I moved off to college, the thing I missed the most about home was fishing with Seth. Those of you who like to fish can relate, there’s just something nice about throwing a line in during the last moments of the day with a buddy, and not ever having any pressure to keep up conversation. You can just do what you do at that particular time: catch and release.

When I started shooting with serious intent to make a living at it, I realized I grew up in a place that offered a ton of unique lifestyle and natural history stories to tell, and this was one of them. I remember intently paying attention that evening to the colors of the open-sky sunset as it was playing out on the water while Seth and my father, Jay, were fishing (I opted for the camera instead of the Shimano). I was concentrating on silhouettes and ripples in the water toward the end of our time on the banks of the lake, but the one shot that really stuck with me was the one you see above. When we were leaving, Seth decided to walk across the lake dam toward the house, offering a perfect end-of-the-run type shot: a closer.

It doesn’t take much to figure out the technical components of the shot. I metered close to where you can see the sun went down in order to underexpose the sky and get that nice, tack sharp, contrasty silhouette. Even though I was shooting with an ultra-wide angle lens, I was zoomed in to 35mm, so warping Seth was not that big of an issue. I learned a long time ago that you don’t need a large amount of area below the horizon in a silhouette to make it interesting (less void space to distract from what’s really important), and by placing very little below the horizon, I was able to show the immensity of that sky, as well as the full gradient of blue/purple hues rendered chemically in the emulsion. Conceptually, this also made the young man walking along with fishing rod in hand that much more the story and point of focus in the shot.

I love this shot!

I have not taught a single introductory photography course at the college level without showing this shot for various compositional and storytelling purposes, and I rarely make a public presentation where it is absent from the slide show. Shots that involve this much of yourself, even though you’re not in them, just seem to make for authentically richening experiences to detail to others, technically, aesthetically, and in regard to communicating a personally meaningful story. For those photographers reading this, I hope you have those images as well – it’s not a crime to convey a bit of yourself in the images you produce. Half of creativity, from my perspective, is understanding the context you are shooting in, and when it is one that is particularly familiar, you have a lot more to say with the camera!

I hope you enjoyed this first installment of Finding Favorites. I look forward to sharing more with you down the road!

This small pasture is right next to the house I grew up in on Meadows Ranch, and with the sun setting, it just simply lights up, glowing gold in stark contrast with the rich blues of the thick layer of clouds the sun happened to sneak under for a minute or two. Although in the winter, the heads “turkey-foot” heads disappear, the bluestem variety grass that covers this particular hill is always a pleasure to watch at the end of the day. During the Spring and early Summer, if the rain is right, it’s as thick as carpet and waves in the wind as if it were an ocean of green and earthy brown.

It’s the simpler things in life.

The good folks over at Craft & Vision this week tweeted a request for the best photography tips out there! Needless to say, there are many “best” tips, and there were some great ones provided! I’ll add one more to it. It’s certainly not the “best” tip, but it’s one you should throw in the back of your tool bag as a photographer and student of the craft: RE-visit familiar places.

I was recently asked by a fellow photographer and writer where my favorite place in Texas was to photograph. That’s a hard question to answer, and I don’t think my reply was very helpful. Big Bend. The Southern High Plains. The Cross-Timbers. The Llano and Sabinal Rivers. The list really could go on. Truth is: I know those places. There’s something that draws me to them, time after time, and I always find something new and unique to point a lens toward. However, I also try to return to previous shots that I know worked. I don’t do this all the time, but there are certain places that really just impact you visually. A place that you want to see again, just to make sure it’s there.

I thought about this when editing through some images I took a couple months ago (above) on the ranch where I grew up, The Meadows Ranch. I spent my whole life there before leaving for college, and between bicycle rides with my siblings and cousins, working cattle and goats with my grandfather and uncle, and grilling burgers with my parents on Saturday afternoons, I would say I know a thing or two about that special place as well. It’s even where I have some of my first distinct memories of getting in to color photography.

I can still remember taking this sunset shot on one of my first rolls of Fujichrome Velvia. More importantly, I remember it being a cool Fall evening and the sky lit up with the pinks and blues. Nevermind the tree with no leaves, this was the entree of winter after all. The rows of round-baled hay in the background “rounded” out the image to signify exactly where it was taken. Anyone that grew up on The Meadows Ranch would surely be able to identify this tree, and take you straight to it!

When I’m back home, I often RE-visit this area, just to see if there’s another image worth making. Sometimes I don’t even have a camera handy, or the light isn’t exactly promising, but I’ll glance at it, knowing that’s where at least a couple images worth talking about were made. I don’t want to center an entire trip back home (photographically speaking) just on this one area, nor would I go back to Dolan Falls year after year just to photograph the water from the same angle. However, areas that are familiar to us are attractive to approach with a camera once again, especially with the intent of finding something new. Maybe the composition doesn’t have to change. Maybe it’s a new season (maybe there’s leaves on the tree). Maybe you were just hiking by and you said to yourself, “I might as well grab a few here again also.”

No matter what the reason, it might be worth your while every now and then to check in on an old friend. As much as we talk about the “new” and progressively searching for something unique, we forget that sometimes part of the photographic learning process is to RE-VISIT and RE-SEE previous areas!

Just a small tip! I’m in Chicago today through Sunday, so if you want to meet up, shoot me an e-mail or comment!

Late as always! I’ve actually been pretty absent from the blog and my Twitter account here of late to finish up a few assignments. I’ll have another Field Lighting, if not two, up this week to make up for last week.

In the meantime, I have uploaded the free March desktop calendar for your downloading pleasure. It’s that time of year again in Texas, when livestock, particularly cattle, begin to calve out. Growing up on a ranch, I never really noticed how interesting cattle look from straight on when bearing young. You just get the feeling like they’re ready to give birth by this time!