Art of Composition Part Nine

In the last installment of the Art of Composition, I discussed the psychological impact of being eyelevel with your subject. When we present our subjects in such a way as to bring our viewers eye to eye with animals, it opens up a whole new world for those viewers. For some photographers, such things may be a bit too esoteric for their comfort level to discuss. If this is you, have no fear. There is an entirely logical side to all of this as well.

While writing this article, I am currently sitting in my rooftop tent at a campsite in the Yukon Territory. It’s migration. Both for the birds and for myself. And it’s for this reason that in addition to the menagerie of stone sheep, woodland caribou, wood bison, and bears that I’ve spent the last several days with, I’ve also taken advantage of the mass movement of avian life this time of the year offers up the intrepid wildlife photographer as well.

Before heading poleward, I stopped over in the Dakotas to spend a few days hanging out in the in what’s called the prairie potholes region. Millions of little ponds and kettles and potholes dot the landscape here compliments of the Laurentide Icesheet which resulted in what waterfowl biologists like to call the duck factory. Some 70% of all ducks in North America originate from this belt of little ponds that stretches from Saskatchewan south through the Dakotas. From blue wing teal to canvasbacks, gadwalls to redheads, this region is truly a thing to behold if you are into birds.

There are, of course, many challenges to photographing in such conditions. For starters, most of these birds are hunted from here on their breeding grounds south to wherever they overwinter. So, concealment and stealth are a necessity in such a place. But more to the point of this article, the subjects are small and tend to float on top of the water – which for me is a problem.

As I discussed in my last article: the default position to always begin photographing from is eyelevel with your subject. Yet, here I am standing six foot three inches above the earth looking down at very small birds that will quickly fly away if I approach the edge of the water. But even if a bird were to allow me to get close enough to photograph with my 800mm lens, I would create a very blasé two-dimensional composition by towering above them.

Consider for a moment what this would do to the background.

Sure, some twenty meters distant there may be a texture rich cattail marsh in the background. But if I’m standing up shooting down at my subject, this isn’t my background. Instead, my background is a patch of water 3 feet behind the bird.

Now, let’s consider the foreground in the composition – which, from this angle, there isn’t a foreground. It’s just bird on water.

Everyone reading this article has likely created a photograph much like the one I describe above - myself included. Maybe it wasn’t a ruddy duck or something more exotic like an eared grebe. Maybe it was a great egret or roseate spoonbill. The species doesn’t matter here. What matters is the end result. You come home, look at the photograph and find yourself scratching your head as to why the image just doesn’t compare with others you have seen.

In this sort of situation, it doesn’t matter how great your camera is, how long your lens is, how beautiful the light was, or how extraordinary the subject was. The fact of the matter is that the photograph is always going to be boring an uninspiring when you shoot from this angle – especially with a bird on or in the water.

But as you get lower, as you get closer to eyelevel with the subject, everything begins to change dramatically.

First and foremost, you create the connection with the subject that I spoke of in the last installment of this series.

Secondly, that distant background, that cattail marsh in the example above, suddenly comes into play and becomes a soft out of focus background that makes your subject “pop.” This is a very important part of the equation, one that cannot be overstated. The success or failure of an wildlife photograph, more often than not, rests on your ability to make the subject standout from the environment in a compelling way. I talk about this at length in an upcoming episode of the PhotoWILD Podcast during a discussion on photographing bighorn sheep. Bird or mammal, positioning yourself so as to work with a distant background rather than a close one makes a huge impact on your photographs and compositions. And getting low, getting eye level with the subject makes it so much easier to do just that.

And third, the water in front of the bird begins to take on the function of a foreground element – complete with a soft and abstract painterly reflection of the bird.

Last year, while down in Florida, I made two photographs of the same bird as an example of how all this works. These photos are just snapshots created to show how the composition changes when we change our angle of view to that of eyelevel with our subjects. In this first photograph of a roseate spoonbill, I stood side by side with several other photographers shoot at the same level and creating the same composition they were. Ignore the behavior and position of the bird. This isn't important. Instead analyze the entire composition. This is a photograph you have likely seen a million times before. It's one that you have likely created yourself. Now, take a look at the next photo.

This photo is of the exact same bird in the exact same location created mere seconds after the first one. I snapped the first image, then I laid down on the bank of the river, still next to the other photographers, and snapped this for comparison. These photographs are worlds apart from each other. The composition is dramatically different. The look and feel is dramatically different. The colors are dramatically different. And all I did was get on the ground.

​In other words, getting eyelevel with the subject opens a whole new world of dimension for your composition.

Landscape photographers live and die by the mindset that there must be a foreground, middle ground, and background in their compositions. But this isn’t just about landscape photography. The big surprise is that this concept is just as important to wildlife photography as it is landscapes.

This isn’t to say that simply having a foreground and background in your composition is all that’s necessary. They need to be compelling. They need to compliment the subject. And in later articles in this series, I will write at great length about what makes a great background – which many professionals consider to be the most important component of a successful wildlife photograph.

Back down in the Dakotas, in order to solve these problems, I spent several days working from a floating blind. This allowed me to have my lens just inches above the surface of the water while I walked around in the marsh keeping the birds at complete ease. Wearing a pair of insulated waders, hidden inside of what amounted to be a camouflaged tent with a lens opening that was all strapped to a couple inflatable pontoons, allowed me to approach and create images of truly challenging subjects that would not have been possible in the wild otherwise.

Yes, this did wonders for allowing me to approach to within feet of birds that would have flown at the mere site of me otherwise. But the main goal of it all was to be able to approach AND photograph these secretive and highly skittish water birds from an eyelevel position in order to create the most compelling compositions possible.

None of this is to say that you have to get comfortable wearing waders in four feet of water and mud to create good photographs, of course. Instead, I mention all of this to show you the lengths to which we often go to achieve this position and the look and feel of the compositions we are after.

I also realize that many people reading this may not be able to always get down at eyelevel with their subjects. Some subjects make it easier than others, of course. The moose that just walked past my camp stood roughly seven feet tall at the shoulders. Getting eyelevel with him would not have been a problem for anyone. But with small subjects, with ground hugging subjects or those who sit low on the surface of the water, this does become more challenging. And while you might not feel comfortable wallowing around in the mud on your belly or standing waist deep in the water with what looks like a muskrat hut overtop of your head, even going so far as to just sit or kneel will make a tremendous impact on your composition – not to mention what it does to keep animals calm and even encourage their curiosity of you.

To Be Continued. . .