Visualize, Plan, Shoot!

When I’m helping a student set up a shot, I always ask three questions: “Have you refined your composition?” “What is your exposure strategy?” And, most importantly of all, “How could you make the best possible photograph of your subject?” This image taken near Columbine Falls, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, is an example of a photograph that requires planning and precise timing to achieve a composition where the rising sun appears perfectly framed by the rock formation. With that third question, I’m not asking what more the student could do at that moment. The first two questions largely address that task. I’m asking them to visualize possibilities that don’t exist at that instant. I ask, “What if you came back at sunset? What parts of the subject would be lit? Would the sun be in the frame? What if you returned at sunrise? What if you came back at the right time in the lunar cycle and stayed till the galactic center, the most photogenic part of the Milky Way, rose into a jet-black sky? What if you came back at an entirely different time of year, when the angle of sunrise and sunset will be radically different? […]

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