Art of Composition Part Six

Thus far in this series of articles on composition, I have focused entirely on depth of field – why it matters in respect to composition and the various factors that dramatically impact it. While I think I have truly beaten this topic to death, I do think there is one last thing that needs to be discussed here and that is my functional perspective on aperture.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a treatise on what an aperture is and how it works. I’m pretty sure you already know this. Instead, I want to discuss functional apertures for wildlife photography and the psychological impact they have on our compositions.

Heady stuff?

Maybe.

But let’s begin with a story. . .

For many years my go to aperture setting was f/8 to ensure I obtained as much of my subject in focus while also trying to find a balance with creating out of focus backgrounds. I wasn’t alone in this thought process. For mammal photography, f/8 has long been the gold standard – at least for portrait work. A moose with a big set of antlers that takes up at least ¼ or more of the frame? f/8. A frame filling photograph of a brown bear running through the water? f/8.

The idea behind this strategy is rooted in the very real notion that depth of field becomes shallower as one gets closer to the subject – which you should all know by now if you have been following this series of articles. So, it’s important to note that this whole f/8 strategy was based on creating close up portraits - whether full body or head and shoulders. And the further away the subject was for me, the smaller the f/stop I would use.

But the problem with this, for me at least, was that I always preferred the look and feel of extremely shallow depths of field and the subsequent bokeh that it created in my compositions. There was something more magical about these photographs. Something ethereal. Something that seemed to take root in my imagination and maybe even my limbic system.

At some point and time, it dawned on me that I was making huge assumptions in my photography by opting to use smaller apertures like f/8 for wildlife portrait work. I assumed I needed more depth of field. I assumed this was the “right way” to photograph these situations. Almost every wildlife photographer I knew who prioritized mammals in their work did the same thing. It was in all the forums. You could find it in the pages of every book that even hinted at wildlife photography techniques. Colleagues did it. Photographers I looked up to did it. And so, I too went about my life blissfully following other people’s artistic assumptions.

Understand that I was making a fulltime living with my wildlife photography at this point, raising a family, paying all the bills, etc. So, the images obviously sold. The concept worked. I was able to justify my habits without ever having to reconsider them. For most lenses f/8 is even the sharpest aperture – especially with zoom lenses.

But as artists, as responsible humans, we should always find the time to occasionally challenge and rip apart all our assumptions and preconceived notions, our belief systems, our paradigms, our world views, and see if we still believe these things or if we are just coasting through life out of habit.

And so, that’s what I did.

One cold and dark and miserable winter night, I set pouring through a decade worth of photographs in my library sizing up my body of work and trying to decide what I liked, what I hated, how I could improve upon it. Through this process, the concept of depth of field once again arose and I had to challenge myself on this.

Above all else, I am first and foremost an artist. As an artist, what I do should always be an extension of my own creative expression, my own artistic vision. If I like something, if it works for me, if I find myself captivated by the look and feel of a style or technique, then regardless of what the “old guard” of wildlife photography says, it’s absolutely right and correct for me.

That’s the beauty of art, right? Even though we like to weld the word “rule” onto artistic concepts – such as the rule of thirds or the rule of odds – the reality of the situation is that there are NO rules. Art is nothing if not subjective.

Concepts like the “rule of thirds” work for in some situations, but to call them a rule is to suggest an adherence to them is as important as the rule of law. This just isn’t true. There are countless reasons that the “rule of thirds” can be a terrible compositional strategy – which I will go into great depth further along in this series.

So, if I fully believed that there was no such thing as rules in art, then why did I cling so tightly to this notion that more depth of field in wildlife portraits was important?

Inevitably, all of this led me to do what I do and fall down the rabbit hole of trying to understand why shallower depths of field appealed to me so much. Little did I know, this would send me chasing down concepts rooted in both physiology and psychology.

In the upcoming summer issue of PhotoWILD Magazine, I will publish a feature article all about how understanding human physiology and psychology will revolutionize your photography. But in the context of this article I’m going to keep this focused on the human eye and our perception of depth of field.

You already know that our eye’s pupil functions just like the aperture of our lenses. But did you know there is a corresponding range? As in, we can measure the changing size of the pupil to exact f/stops?

Essentially, your eye has a variable aperture that ranges from the equivalent of f/2.1 to f/8.

Under normal circumstances, our eye has an equivalent depth of field to f/2.1 in low light and f/8 in the brightest of light.

Understanding this basic fact brings into question our insistence on using apertures such as f/22. For landscape photography, this can work because of how it mirrors the way in which we experience a landscape. In Grand Teton National Park, you might first look at the mule’s ear wildflowers in front of you and then shift your focus to the Snake River and eventually the cathedral peaks of the Teton Range in the background. In an earlier installment of this series I explained how that there is only ever one spot in our vision that is ever actually in focus. So, we shift focus from flower to river to mountains as we scan the scene. And with a landscape photograph of the same scene, our eyes work the same way – shifting from flower to mountains as we take it all in.

But wildlife is different.

Like it or not, you are a mammal – unless you are an AI bot sent by Google. But for the sake of this article, let’s assume no one reading this falls into the artificial intelligence category and therefore we all of us crawled out of the same primordial soup that all other species of mammals, and technically life in general, came from. As such, our bodies and minds all evolved for survival – survival on the day to day and survival of our genetic line.

Back when loincloths were high fashion, the sudden appearance of another animal, large or small, would demand all of our attention and focus. Get distracted by something else in the background and you go hungry or fill someone else’s belly. Be it food or foe that we were confronted with, we evolved a hyper acuity of vision that is truly only surpassed in the menagerie of animals by raptors such as eagles as a means of survival.

If the animal was potential food, our pupils dilated, the aperture widened, our focus became razor sharp, our field of view narrowed, depth of field narrowed, and our attention became (and still becomes) so fine-tuned on what’s before us that everything else more or less seems to disappear. Hungry bellies drive much about our physiology and evolution.

If the animal was a predator, a danger, an existential crisis, our bodies dumped adrenaline into our systems – the fight or flight hormone. When this occurs, our eyes have evolved for our pupils to dilate in response. Dilation means the pupils get bigger when fight or flight situations occur. Bigger pupils mean bigger apertures. Bigger apertures mean shallower depths of field. Shallower depths of field mean more intense visual acuity and sharper focus on the thing at hand.

In other words, even though our own eyes have the ability to range from an equivalent f/stop of f/2.1 – f/8, in the presence of other animals, in the presence of potential protein, in the presence of potential danger, we evolved to go into f/2.1 mode so as to bring all focus onto the “thing” before us and drown out everything else.

For me, this was a tremendous revelation.

When we suddenly find ourselves with another animal taking up a big part of our field of view, we never physically experience this situation with increased depth of field. This is not an f/8 moment for us. This is not a situation in which our brains want to also focus in on the “happy little trees” of a Bob Ross painting. Instead, we have evolved to automatically open up our aperture and go into f/2.1 mode for purpose of survival.

Most animals do this, of course – especially predators like us. Have you ever watched a coyote or wolf lower their head and peer up at you? The look is so very predatorial like. It gives some people the shivers just to see it. But the coyote isn’t going into hunting mode. Instead, they are trying to sharpen their focus on you to determine your intent and whether you are dangerous or not in the way in which their own evolution shaped their physiology. Meanwhile, your pupils are dilating, narrowing the depth of field on the coyote, as your brain kicks into hyperdrive analyzing what’s before you.

So how does all this relate to wildlife photography?

If we have evolved in such a way to narrow down our focus and depth of field when confronted by potential food or foe, then photographing with the shallow of depths of field mimics our innate physiological response to the same situation in the wild and the same psychological experience that occurs along with this.

Realizing this changed the way I approached my art.

Our experience of art is also rooted in our very own biology. Beauty can be defined by symmetry and the very same mathematical algorithms as the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio. The very landscapes that are so appealing to us on a universal level, as the now late Edward O. Wilson explains in his theory of Biophilia, can be traced back to the origin of our own species.

We are mammals. We have more in common with black bears and red foxes than differences. The way we see the world, how we experience gut instincts about it, how we engage with it, how we respond to it – be it the real or the manufactured version of the world around us – all comes back down to our own basic biology. When a car suddenly slams on the breaks in front of you, your mind and body respond exactly as it would if that had been a leopard.

So, for me, I prioritize shooting with wide open apertures for this reason. I carry 400mm f/2.8 and 600mm f/4 lenses around with me for this reason. I do what it takes to get closer and make my depth of field as shallow as possible. I attempt to find separation between subject and background to help our eyes focus in on whatever it is I want you to focus in on. And the point of all this for me is to recreate how we experience the natural world on a psychological level in my artwork because I want people to connect, to relate, to find mystery and magic in it.

To Be Continued. . .