Distractions

Amanda by William Beem

I took this shot of Amanda at my first work­shop. It was all very new to me. We had a group of peo­ple stand­ing around, the stu­dio lights were setup and our first model, Amanda, was there wait­ing for my direc­tion. The instruc­tor picked me to step up first to start shooting.

I had no idea what I was doing.

Every image I’d ever seen of a model in a mag­a­zine, adver­tise­ment or any photo imme­di­ately dis­ap­peared from my mind. I had no idea how to direct her. What do I ask her to do? Is the power of the stu­dio light cor­rect? Am I using my favorite aper­ture (inside joke)? A mil­lion thoughts raced through my mind as I approached Amanda for our first por­trait shots.

The thought that didn’t hit me until it was over is that I had a dis­tract­ing back­ground run­ning through her head.

For­tu­nately for me, a work­shop is a for­giv­ing place where you can exper­i­ment and make mis­takes with­out dis­ap­point­ing any­one else. You sign up to learn and mis­takes are part of the experience.

It is very easy to let your­self get caught up in the expe­ri­ence of pho­tog­ra­phy and for­get about the rea­son you’re there — to make an image. Some things will be out of your con­trol, par­tic­u­larly if you’re shoot­ing at an event where you can’t move your subject.

Even in those cir­cum­stances, I’ve learned that I still need to pre-​visualize the image I expect to make. Let’s use the con­cert class I took last month as an exam­ple. My sub­jects are mov­ing around on a stage, lights are every­where, fog is blast­ing out of a machine at ran­dom inter­vals and I have 39 other pho­tog­ra­phers around me vying for space. Even with all of those dis­trac­tions, I knew that I had to look for the oppor­tu­ni­ties to frame my shot to exclude the dis­tract­ing elements.

Some­times that means you miss a moment, or per­haps you catch a moment with the dis­trac­tion as part of the scene. You have to decide if the moment you cap­tured was impor­tant enough to excuse the back of someone’s head block­ing the lower third of the image.

In this case, my dis­trac­tion was let­ting myself get over­whelmed with an unfa­mil­iar sit­u­a­tion. As a result, I ended up with a photo of a lovely woman with a dis­tract­ing piece of wood shoot­ing through her head. Given the way it closely matches the color of her hair, it’s a real pain to extract that man­tle in Pho­to­shop. It would’ve been far eas­ier (and smarter) to sim­ply ask her to move to another spot with­out a dis­tract­ing back­ground. I’ve heard peo­ple say “I’ll fix it in Pho­to­shop.” Some­times I’ve been one of those peo­ple. If it’s not just a mat­ter of mov­ing a slider, it’s far quicker and eas­ier to fix the prob­lem before you take the shot.

The trick is to not let your­self be so dis­tracted that you can’t see the prob­lem. Slow down a lit­tle. Mod­ern cam­eras can rip out frames very quickly, but that’s not a ben­e­fit if they all suck because you didn’t elim­i­nate some distraction.