How the Camera Teaches Us to See Our Most Beautiful World
Our beautiful world showcased at the Indian Botanic Garden, Howrah, near Kolkata.
There’s no doubt that we live in a most beautiful world. But have you ever wondered how the camera can teach us to better perceive and appreciate the world around us?
Our beautiful world is a vital and living environment of which we’re a part. Photographers utilize cameras, for documentary and creative purposes, to reveal details of our world and, via the use of narrative, symbolism and metaphor, to tell stories and explore meanings and relationships within it.
I discovered this old boat and tree lined waterway while exploring the massive and very impressive Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden in Howrah, near Kolkata, India.
It’s one of the most picturesque scenes I’ve ever had the privilege to photograph and a great example of our beautiful world.
The day was really hot and the light very bright. Under normal circumstances that would result in a photo with a burnt out sky and dense, black shadows.
Fortunately, I was able to fill the top of the frame with tree leaves and branches and, thereby, exclude most of the sky from the composition.
What’s more, the humid conditions resulted in light cloud cover, which reduced the brightness of the sky and, as a consequence, the dynamic range of the scene.
These factors combined to prevent all but the very darkest parts of the image rendering black. As you can see, the tonal scale is quite wide with a range of tones from black to white.
Together with its picturesque nature, the abundant details, tones and shapes within the image made it it an obvious candidate for rendering into black and white.
I also added a subtle warmth to the highlights to provide the impression of a summer’s day.
Pond and houses in the idyllic historical village of Hongcun in China.
Beautiful World Showcased in Hongcun Village, China
This photo features a pond and surrounding houses in the village of Hongcun in Anhui province, China.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Hongcun is regarded as a classic and well preserved Chinese village showcasing traditional Huizhou architectural style buildings.
I made the picture near the end of the day, which explains the lack of people in this normally highly touristed village.
The pool of water wasn’t at all clean, but that didn’t stop one local from pulling a sizeable fish out of it for that night’s dinner.
Hongcun is said to be quite a wealthy village, being used as a set in many Chinese television and motion picture productions. No doubt the abundant quantities of tourists visiting the village also contribute to its wealth.
We live in a very beautiful world and I’m so fortunate to have had the good luck to travel to China on four or five occasions since 1988.
On this particular adventure I met a young, primary school aged girl while exploring the backstreets of Hongcun. I was extremely impressed with her high standard of English and I gratefully accepted an invitation to come home and meet her father.
Such opportunities are among my favorite travel experiences. I was only sorry that, with daylight fading and a flight booked for that evening, I had to decline the family’s dinner invitation and get on with making a few final photos.
When Our Beautiful World Belonged To Men
American photographer Dorothea Lange is a giant in the history of photography. Best known for her famous image titled Migrant Mother, made in 1936 during her time working as part of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) program.
Created during the Great Depression, long before television and the internet, the FSA sought to raise awareness across the USA of the dire needs of impoverished farmers.
As a consequence of the photos created by Lange and her contemporaries money, often in the form of loans, was provided by the government of the USA to combat rural poverty.
“The camera teaches us how to see without a camera.”
Due to limited opportunities and a radically different socioeconomic structure, few women at that time were able to work in creative fields like photography.
For Dorothea Lange to have produced such a significant body of work, including a number of absolute classics photos, is an incredible achievement. And she did so at a time when our beautiful world belonged, largely, to men.
The history of photography owes much to the hard work and vision of Dorothea Lange and other FSA photographers such as Walker Evans.
Porter, carrying goods up a steep stairway, on Huangshan (Yellow Mountain), China.
Photos Document Our Beautiful World At A Moment In Time
The clarity and detailed documentary nature of the photograph helps us to more clearly perceive and remember the transient nature of how we experience our beautiful world, in a way that we might otherwise not be able to appreciate.
In addition to photographing epic landscapes and spectacular wildlife, it’s the ability to document the human condition that’s become so important in my own photography practice.
As a case in point, I made this photo of a porter, making his way along a lonely, windswept pathway and up endless flights of stairs to deliver supplies to hotels servicing the needs of tourists on the spectacular Huangshan Mountain in Anhui province, China.
The world around us is monumental. The camera helps us slice that world up into smaller pieces and individual moments in time, usually within a fraction of a second.
As creative beings, it’s our choice of lens focal length, camera orientation and composition that begins to determine the reality of the photograph in question.
We do this in several important ways:
Choosing what to include and exclude from the frame.
Choosing the angle from which we make a photo and, through perspective, the relationship between the subject and their surroundings.
Choosing to illuminate the subject or scene with front, side or back light as a way of revealing detail and color, emphasizing shape and texture or adding drama and mystery to the image.
About to Travel?
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Here’s a photo of one of so many staircases I climbed on my hike across Huangshan Mountain in the middle of a Chinese winter.
China is blessed with an abundance of epic landscapes, but if ever there was an example of our beautiful world, it would be Huangshan (i.e., Yellow Mountain).
However, like anything that’s worthwhile achieving, one’s appreciation of Huangshan doesn’t come without effort and, during the middle of winter, a degree of hardship.
Though just a tiny slice of the adventure, I like the above image as I think it adequately documents the difficult, lonely and bleak beauty one experiences traversing the trails on Huangshan Mountain at that time of year.
It remains one of the greatest adventures I’ve undertaken and I really hope to return, at least once more, to this epic mountain location.
By taking a creative approach to how we photograph our beautiful world we learn how to perceive and experience these moments, both with and without the camera.
So a walk in the park or down a city street becomes an immersive experience that goes far beyond the notion of capturing an image.
Actually, I hate the use of the words take, capture and shoot and how they’ve so successfully infiltrated the photography vernacular, particularly when it comes to describing the process of photographing our most beautiful world.
I wrote a post titled Basic Photography Vocabulary: Why I Hate These 3 Ugly Words which lays out my case and, hopefully, will prompt you to think about avoiding the use of these words when describing your own creative photography.
Spectacular sunset illuminates the sky above Mitre Peak, Milford Sound, New Zealand.
Better Photos Come By Photographing Our Beautiful World
Milford Sound is a truly wondrous place. I’ve visited and photographed there on several occasions and, on this particular trip, had the good fortune to meet my friend, Trey Ratcliff.
In fact Trey and I met while photographing this spectacular sunset. How’s that for luck!
I got so involved photographing this scene that I continued on, well after Trey had moved on, making photos of the night sky.
Of course my travel companion decided to wandered off without mentioning anything to me and, before I knew it, I was alone in total darkness.
Normally that wouldn’t be too much of a problem but, on this occasion, by headlamp failed to work and I was without a mobile phone.
So much for photographing our beautiful world. I’d had a great time doing just that, but now I was beginning to wonder if I’d get out of this predicament.
By that stage the tide had come in and cut me off from the little promontory from which I’d made my way out to the edge of the Sound to make my photos.
I soon realized I’d lost my bearings and was now marooned on a tiny patch of earth, only a few metres in diameter, as the tide continued to rise.
Not only that, I could no longer make out any of the trees, mountains or the distant hotel and pub.
I can tell you it was a very slow and scary return journey, across the shallows and into mud, prior to arriving back on terra firma in front of the pub, not long before it closed.
Reunited with Trey and my wandering friend, I’m happy to report that it all turned out okay. But I learned a valuable lesson that night, one I hope will protect me from misadventure in the future.
Conclusion: Continue to Share Photos Of Our Beautiful World
Photographers, as artists, are visually creative people.
But to live the life of a photographic artist it's necessary to practice the discipline by actually making pictures, both with the camera and, for those who desire to take their craft further, on the desktop.
Photography helps us see and perceive the presence of our living, beautiful world as it unfolds around us. By doing so we’re better able to appreciate life on this planet and our unique place in the cosmos.
“The act of photography can help connect us with the world around us, and with that certain inner beauty existing on the edge of our understanding.”
Once in this zone the photographer no longer needs a camera to make these vital and profound connections.
The camera now becomes the vehicle by which we record how we feel about that experience.
It's my view that, like meditation and spiritual practices, the camera is a tool which allows us to connect, distill and share our own, unique experiences of the sublime with others.
It’s in this way that I believe photography can save our most beautiful world, one photo at a time.
