It’s a busy old world. A constant rush to meet mostly fictitious and often self-imposed deadlines. It’s all about time. Our most precious commodity. In both photography and travel, speed is the enemy and time the most creative tool.
Taking time
As travellers, all our best experiences come when we slow down and let slower the journey guide us; take in the moment, stop and have that conversation with a stranger which goes beyond hello. Make a connection with a place or a person.
Where is the image? I knew there was a shot in there somewhere but it took an year and a half for the the right light and the elements to align
In photography, time is even more crucial and plays a role in everything we do. We find a shot but is the light right? Is the weather right? Is the shutter speed right, Is it the right moment? Do we take the picture anyway? Hopefully not!
I remember many years ago that I passed by some fields near to my house. It was just two ploughed fields with a sparse line of naked trees separating them and running at 90 degrees to the lane I was on, about a hundred metres away. It was unremarkable in every sense.
My photographer’s instinct told me there was a picture there, but I had no idea what it was or even what format I’d shoot it in if I did. I just knew the line of trees and their orientation held something, held an image.
The day it all changed
Over the next year and a half I returned numerous times to look again and again. Still no picture was jumping out at me. Then one day in February it snowed. About 2 or 3 centimetres fell gently until early afternoon. At this time of year, darkness descended by late afternoon but, with skies clearing, this left a small window to get out with the camera. So I headed out to these two fields.
In that short time between grabbing my camera gear and arriving at the now snow-covered fields a low-level mist had risen to knee height on top of the snow dusting and the sinking sun began to colour the sky behind the line of trees as it descended toward the horizon. I had never seen it like this before in that year and a half of looking and revisiting.
Waiting gave me time to observe but also to pre-visualise the image which these weather conditions were making possible. As I did this, the camera and image format became obvious, as if they were emerging from the mist. Just before leaving home, and with my 35mm kit in the car, I suddenly thought it might be an idea to take the Hasselblad X-Pan as well, so I grabbed that too. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this camera, it’s a 35mm panoramic film camera, exquisitely engineered and with lenses which give stunning image quality. In image terms it produces 3 by 1 image ratio photographs – twice the width of standard 35mm – instead of 3 by 2 images.
Finding patience
I could have grabbed a shot and gone but the normally drab, uninspiring scene, although already transformed, was still evolving. So I waited. It was cold but the wind was minimal and the chill factor not significant enough to consider passing up the shot and leaving.
An image transformed by the light, moment and patience
Standing in the snowy misty field, waiting for the light, the format chose itself and the X-Pan offered this perfectly. Without the patience imposed by the changing scene, or the ‘be prepared’ attitude of bringing everything just in case (even though I wouldn’t use most of it) the composition would have been a compromise. Yes, I know you can shoot multiple image panoramics and put them together in the computer software afterwards, but this was coming together right in front of me and now. There is something very fulfilling, very photographic, about that – capturing what you see and your vision, your interpretation of it in one click.
When the moment came everything that had happened up to that point went into the shot, but especially the observation and the patience. In the wait the camera was set up with the right lens, optimal aperture and shutter speed selected and the last element, the exposure compensation, dialled in. Pressing the shutter was simply transferring the image, which had already been made, to film.
Every shot has different options. Desaturating the image a little gives a subtlety atmospheric version (above). Panoramic images are almost always shot horizontally. Using the portrait format (left) certainly isn’t intuitive but is can works really well with the right image.
For those of you who’ve never shot on film, then waited a week or two to get it processed, rather than instantly checking what you have on the camera’s screen, there is something very satisfying about knowing that that little film canister contains the image which you’ve created. The patience process you’ve just been through, experience and the skills you’ve developed as a photographer give you that certainty. And you still have the excitement of seeing your vision realised in something tactile, something tangible not just zeroes and ones, to look forward to when you get the film back.
The digital camera experience is fast and immediate, and there are many positives to that. What it encourages, almost demands, is that this speed is transferred into your picture making process. Click and move on to the next one. Film is old-fashioned. It may seem clunky and slow, but what it does do is allow time for the creative process to distill down into the final image. Time to think. Time to do the human processing.
The shot I ended up with couldn’t be considered as a great shot, but it is a huge transformation of a bland scene into something transiently beautiful and vibrant. The window to capture this was short; maybe 10 to 15 minutes after a year and a half of patience, but it was worth the wait just to see this happening, even without the images which emerged in the end. I doubt it’s ever looked like this again, and maybe never will.
Patience pays off
For me, this wasn’t about getting a great shot, or even the shot at all. It was about transformation. About patience, time and the elements aligning. Commercially since, I’ve had to do a lot of what I call smash and grab photography where there isn’t time to wait for the best shot – a sometimes necessary evil of earning a living from photography viable.
Real photography, for me, is about my own personal creative vision aligning with elements, some of which I can’t control but can anticipate. Then optimising the camera-craft. It’s not about the camera or the medium. They’re just tools.
Sometimes you get lucky and arrive somewhere you don’t know at the perfect moment. Mostly you don’t. Mostly it’s a compromise unless you’re prepared to be patient. But when you are, more often than not the shot you end up with is better, more engaging, more atmospheric, more WOW.
Regardless of whether you shoot on a digital or film camera, the same processes and the same respect for time should apply. The difference is a digital camera discourages patience whereas a film camera almost imposes it.
Try it. Next time your out shooting, make an effort to slow down and wait for the shot. Or even come back another time. Don’t get sucked into taking a shot which you know will only ever be average, when you could have created a much better one. Of course, the stars don’t always align. They don’t always bring all the elements together, but when they do one good shot is better and more fulfilling than a hundred average ones.
