The Art of Composition: Part 9

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 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 this as well. 

By working from a floating blind with these two western grebes, I was able to work with a distant background while the water in-between me and the birds became an out-of-focus foreground. Getting eye level with our subjects can have a dramatic impact on our compositions. 

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. 

My floating blind is a permanent fixture in the back of my vehicle. So too are waders. And while I have written quite a bit about using floating blinds, and we even did a couple podcast episodes on this topic (https://www.photowildmagazine.com/podcast/episode-10-a-floating-what), the biggest reason I like using these contraptions has nothing to do with getting closer to wildlife.  

Sure, they help me approach birds to within workable distances that simply wouldn’t be possible otherwise. But there is more to it than that for me. I’m not interested in only getting close. My philosophy is more holistic. It’s the look and feel of the photographs, above all else, that is the foundation of my love affair with floating blinds. And the reason the floating blind assists me in creating these types of images is that it allows me to go to the birds and work with them at eye level.

As I discussed in my last article, the default position for us wildlife folks is always to begin at eyelevel with our subject. But when it comes to just about any species of waterbird, be it egrets or eiders, this is a very tall order. Ducks and grebes, for instance, float atop the water. Egrets and herons wade through it. In other words, it takes a lot more effort to get eyelevel with a bird whose head is a mere six inches above the surface of the water than it does a bull elk whose head is six feet above the ground.

It's for this reason that many photographers become lazy when photographing birds in general. With waterbirds, most opt for working from the bank, or worse yet, a boardwalk above it all. In these situations, even if we kneel or sit down to shoot, we are still looking down at our subjects. And this has a tremendous impact on the look and feel (read: the composition) of the photograph.

First there is the background, which is, of course, the most important top level compositional element to a photograph.

Maybe some twenty meters distant from our bird there is a great stand of texture-rich cattail marsh. The light is soft. The background would be a beautiful addition to the composition. It would help to create the set and setting of the photograph. But there is just one problem. If I’m shooting down at the bird, the marsh isn’t my background. Instead, it’s a patch of water three feet behind the bird. 

Everyone reading this article has likely created a photograph much like the one I describe above - myself included. Maybe it was a ruddy duck. Or maybe it was a roseate spoonbill. The species doesn’t matter here. What matters is the 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 happened to be. 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, suddenly comes into play and becomes a soft out of focus background that makes your subject seam to leap right out of the photograph at you. This is an important part of the equation, one that cannot be overstated. The success or failure of a wildlife photograph, more often than not, rests on your ability to make the subject standout from the environment in a compelling way.  Be it bird or mammal, positioning yourself 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. 

This was the thesis behind the first part of the Art of Composition series, of course. It’s why I began everything with an in-depth discussion on depth of field and bokeh. Distance is everything when it comes to making our subjects stand out and for creating those soft and creamy out-of-focus backgrounds that we all love so much. That’s the distance from your lens to the subject, and the distance of that subject from the background. Three feet of separation between subject and background doesn’t cut it. And a largely in-focus background of water directly behind the subject is just downright boring.

The third part of this equation is the foreground. Shooting down, even slightly, with a subject sitting on the water makes finding or incorporating a foreground challenging. Sure, you can shoot through some vegetation on the bank to create a blurred out an ethereal look, but now you are back to shooting down at the bird again to do so.

But when we get eye level, or even lower, suddenly the water in front of the bird begins to take on and an ethereal and out-of-focus quality that works nicely as a foreground in our compositions.

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

Landscape photographers live and die by the mantra of foreground, middle ground, and background. 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 in 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. 

None of this is to say that you must get comfortable wearing waders in four feet of water and mud to create good photographs, of course. Instead, I mention the floating blinds 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. 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 big impact on your composition – not to mention what it does to keep animals calm and even encourage their curiosity of you.

A Tale of Two Camera Angles. With this photograph, I was standing up next to workshop clients and snapped this example in order to compare and contrast the difference that the angle of view has on the composition. 

In this second photograph, obviously of the same bird and made 10 seconds after the first one, I was laying on my belly. The difference is unmistakable and profound. While both images are of the same bird and water and reflection, the look and feel of the composition is totally different. Standing up produces a background a mere three feet behind the bird, exaggerating the highlights and ripples in the water and creating a broken reflection. Laying down to photograph the be bird changes everything. From this position, the green of the marsh in the distance becomes the background and is reflected into the water; because of the distance of the background, it's soft and completely out-of-focus. The reflection becomes a smooth and painterly sweep of color. And the angle creates a more intimate portrayal of the bird by allowing you to see eye-to-eye with this roseate spoonbill. 

A couple years ago, while on a workshop in some place warmer and more subtropical, we found ourselves photographing roseate spoonbills along the bank of a sluggish creek filled with alligators. The mere thought of those crocodilian jaws lurking in the water created a bit of apprehension for those who were traveling with me. But to photograph the spoonbills, the limpkins, black-necked stilts, little blue herons, lesser yellowlegs, tri-colored herons, and snowy egrets, you had to be willing to become one with the mud and accept the fact that those alligators have zero interest in you.

But alas, the clients weren’t having it. From where we stood, one could quickly count over twenty of these great beasts.

With workshops, it’s often not enough to explain what to do and why to do it. Often, we must simply lead by example. And so, I decided to make two photographs for them as an example of why I wanted them to prostrate themselves in the mud.

Now, neither of these photographs are what some like to refer to as an “award winning shot.” They are static and relatively boring. But that wasn’t the point of making them. The method to my madness here was to simply show everyone why it was so important to get down and dirty in this situation. And to do that, I created one photograph standing up next them where they were firing away at a lone sleeping roseate spoonbill, and another laying down on my belly.

These two photos of the spoonbills here are the result of this exercise in angle of view.

The first image, of course, was created while standing up. This is an identical photo to the ones the clients and other photographers who happened upon the situation created. The second one, however, was from sucking it up and get on the ground. 

When I stood back up and showed everyone the difference between the two images, it was as if the alligators and mud and mosquitoes and thoughts of discomfort instantly vanished and everyone was doing belly flops onto the muddy bank. And from that point on, it didn’t matter if we were photographing reddish egrets dancing in the shallows of an estuary or a little blue heron fishing in the black water swamps, they had experienced the difference and drank the Kool-Aid.

As you can see, the who concept of STARTING at eyelevel with our subjects is multi-functional for us as artists. Not only does it help to bring us into the world of the animals we are photographing, allowing others to see eye-to-eye and making a connection with that animal, it also creates a more simplistic yet powerful composition as well. And for me, simplicity is always the goal. As Pablo Picasso once said, “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”