Shoot Everything Around You!

Just a quick tip for a sleepy Monday morning.

In the world of digital photography, film is essentially free. So shoot everything around you. You never know how a shot will turn out unless you actually take it and no one will ever see your rejects!

I shot this image a few weeks ago at McKinney Falls on a cold, damp and dreary afternoon. Given the weather, I was surprised to see so many folks visiting the falls and couldn’t get a clear shot at the part of the falls that most interested me. Rather than become frustrated I began looking around at the water, the cypress trees and the unusual rock formations all around me. I could see all sorts of potential shots, most quite different from the typical waterfall shots I’d planned. I honestly didn’t know if any of these would turn out, but taking them kept me creatively “limber” while I waited for the tourists to wander off.

I notice this a lot at my workshops. Most folks will concentrate so hard on the subject at hand that they forget to look around for other potential subjects. With digital, film is essentially free so I encourage folks to shoot everything around them, looking for different foreground subjects and different angles. If you don’t think this works, take a look at Thomas Hawk’s incredibly popular Flickr stream. Talk about a prolific shooter!

In Motion – (Onion Creek) Austin, Texas
Copyright 2009 Jeff Lynch Photography
Shot taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II set on manual (M) using an EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens tripod-mounted. The exposure was taken at 47mm, f/16 for 4 seconds at ISO 100 using a Singh-Ray Vari-ND-Duo neutral density and warming polarizer filter. All post capture processing was done in Adobe’s Lightroom 3 Beta. Click on the image above for a larger version.

Posted in Photography Tagged: Canon, Canon 5D Mark II, Landscape Photography, McKinney Falls State Park, Nature Photography, Photography