Smokies Light

If you have limited time to pursue a photography hobby you just have to make do with whatever nature gives you have when you do have the time for picture taking. Last Saturday was a horrible day for taking pictures with a cloudless, very hazy sky, and a brutally hot sun. The cardinal flowers above might have made a great shot in the right conditions. The conditions were not right however. I wanted the bridge to be in the background but that meant shooting into the sun unless I wanted to wait for a very long time. To reach this spot required a steep descent down a bank and leaning up against the bank while taking the pic handheld. Butterflies were all over the flowers but it was too hot and uncomfortable to wait for the perfect butterfly pose while baking in that miserable sun. The sunshine on the flowers contrasting with the dark background gives a slight initial shock value at first look, but a second look just doesn't do it for me on this one. I mainly posted this pic to illustrate the difficulties in gettting an acceptable shot in miserable shooting conditions. The view downstream at this point with the sun behind me in that case just wasn't doable due to the terrain, and the bridge does add a human element.

About composition, the bridge is intentionally out of focus using a shallow depth-of-field. If it were sharp it would have been a distraction from the flowers. The bridge although out of focus is as important to the overall composition as the flowers are and was intended to be that way. The small piece of sky was intentional also. Subconsciously it tells the viewer that everything is ok with the world, the sky is still up, and the river is still down. I did this in the Greenbrier Morning image also, and you will see this practice in a lot of my pics. Managing the sky in the composition is one of the most important aspects in taking decent pics. The point is: to make a decent pic requires attention to every detail in the viewfinder. Take your eyeball, force it off your intended subject and on to each section of the viewfinder. Look for any object or sunny spot that might be a distraction from the subject and recompose if necessary. Nothing happens by accident in a good composition. Every pixel should be planned.

In the image below, the flower is in the shade and the rocks in the river are in the sun. For me the bright rocks are a distraction from the subject. Ideally the sun would have been on the flower and not on the rocks. With artificial shading on the flower I would have had control of the light, but it wasn't to be. The subject is dull resulting in an overall dull image, a dud, but sometimes you just have to make do.