Walk Around The Tree And Learn To See.

Ron.... One of the very first assignments when teaching a photography class was to send the students out on a mission, the mission was to photograph a lone tree in a field. When the photography students would return to class the following session they would come in with their images of the trees. Almost always it was taken from the side of the road and in most cases right out the window of the car. then after that the tree would be bulls eyed dead center of the print.

Now for the lesson. We would lay the pictures out and talk about composition and image placement, we also talked about how we read from left to right and the importance of the rule of thirds. That was all fine and dandy but what I really wanted to teach them about the tree photo was this. See the tree from a angle different then from the road see the tree from a position few have seen the tree from before. I challenged them to walk around the tree, lay under the tree, climb the tree, use a wide range of focal lengths to photograph the tree. I was amazing to see the difference when they returned with the pictures not only were the pictures much more interesting to look at but the students came back excited because they realized there was almost endless ways they could look at their subject.

When I'm photographing people I take that same approach, I literally walk around them lay on the floor shooting up at them, get on a latter and shoot down at them. the girl in the photo above I laid under the truck and shot up at her goal was to see the country girl painted on her tail gate. and with the boy I laid on my stomach with my camera flat on the ground with a 24mm lens to get that effect. You will be amazed at how many different looks you can get with your subject posed in the same position. If you don't have a inherent ability to see, train your eye to see, by walking around the tree.