Extraordinary Images From Ordinary Places

by Michael  Goldstein

 

My wife, Allison and I were driving the hills around East Barnard, Vermont, when  she suddenly yelled for me to stop.  Coming around a corner on a dirt road, she had spotted an unusual double-peaked barn.            By getting right down at the water surface, we could see the barn reflected in a small pond in front of it.  We used a 24mm lens with a blue-yellow filter, to enhance the blue of the pond, while not polarizing out the barn’s reflection in the water.   A very small lens aperture ensured everything would be in focus.                     To add to our satisfaction in finding this shot, no photographic guide we’d found so far had featured it.  However, we found a book in Woodstock, Vermont, the following week, entitled “Barns of New England” ... and this barn was featured on the front cover!            Later, we determined that, if you approached the barn from the “wrong” direction, you didn’t see this shot at all ... you have to come down the road in the right direction, to see it revealed in front of you.

The day was sunny and clear, the morning light superb.  My wife Allison and I packed tripods and camera bags and headed down to the Lake Ontario shore.  When we arrived at our sailing club, we found the usual collection of sailing dinghies and dollies, up to their collective hips in two feet of snow.  It was early February.

 

I’ve spent many hours of warm-weather time at that club, sailing my fourteen-foot sloop-rigged dinghy in Toronto’s harbor waters.   Of course, I’ve done a lot of shooting there, as well, garnering the usual summer shots of sailboats and sailors, hulls and halyards.  However, I’d never been there in the winter just after a blizzard blew through. My wife and I discovered a whole new world of smooth, rounded shapes emerging from snowdrifts, favorite summer toys lying abandoned in the storm, and rows of sleek craft waiting, covered in colorful canvas. Allison’s artistic juices began to flow at once, and we were soon hunkered down over our tripods, exchanging creative ideas. This entire experience of becoming visually excited by a very familiar environment simply because the season was “wrong” started me thinking: “How many other familiar places are waiting to present great new photographic opportunities?”

 

When I thought about it, I realized opportunity is simply a matter of mindset.   As Allison constantly tells me, you have to think like a tourist (and view your surroundings through a visitor’s eyes), even when you’re in your hometown--especially when you’re in your hometown! That’s the first rule of opportunity. It has served me well for two decades of freelance travel journalism.

 

While you’re thinking like a tourist, you’ll realize that every exotic place you’ve ever visited or wished to visit is “ho-hum” to many people. They’ve lived there for years, seen it all, and would love to visit some other exotic place.  If you work from the idea that “exotic” describes any place you’ve never seen, you soon realize that every place is exotic, if you just put yourself into the mind of a first-time visitor.

 

For example, we live in Toronto, a wonderful place for sailing and bicycling with a variety of live theatre, a constantly changing collection of excellent restaurants, and so much green space that you can easily pretend you live in the country.  I suspect that there are hordes of folk out there who would love to visit Toronto and think of it as an exotic location. For us, it’s familiar ground, but I have a large carousel full of my favorite Toronto photography, backed up by a large archival 3-ring binder, and I am constantly adding to the collection.

 

Think of how much film (or the digital equivalent) you shoot when you arrive in a new vacation destination.  The scenes are all so exciting, so new... so exotic. You don’t mind getting up early, or staying out late, to capture great shots. If you adopt the philosophy that those same great shots are being chased by visiting photographers in your hometown right now, you’ll soon find yourself in your neighborhood park at dawn, walking the city centre in the late afternoon checking out building reflections, or tramping through the snowdrifts at your sailing club, in February.

 

This starting point mindset leads to the second rule:  Always carry a camera. Familiar places will certainly present wonderful photographic opportunities, but you have to be ready. A photographer lives in our neighborhood whose license plate reads, “F8 BETHERE”.  He has the right idea.

 

So now we come to the third rule:  You need to stretch your imagination when you’re making images.   If you come home with the same shots that you see in magazines or at the camera club, you won’t maintain your creative high very long. Your challenge is to create new ways of viewing familiar scenes, so the viewer thinks yours is the most exciting photo location he has ever seen. When that viewer is you, you’ve achieved your goal.

 

To create new viewpoints, you have to work with a variety of lenses and filters and be ready to exploit the rules and techniques of image composition. One way to do this is to explore one of your favorite locations with only one lens, then go back a second time and shoot the same places with a different lens. You’ll soon learn the knack of being able to visualize how a composition will appear using different lenses. 

 

Some compositions almost dictate which lens to use. An image with a circular motif  (like the turntable area at the end of the San Francisco cable car line) cries out for a fish-eye lens. Shooting the same cable car on the rise of Russian Hill, so that the Bay appears behind the car, requires a 300mm telephoto lens. “Ah, but that’s a very exotic location!” you say.  Millions of people in San Francisco call it home and use the cable cars simply as convenient transportation. They wonder what all the fuss is about. 

 

So, go out into your backyard at midnight. Visit your favorite golf course in January. Walk along that familiar river when it’s flooding its banks. Turn up at your local farmers’ market at dawn, and stock up on film or pixels.  You’ll need it all!

 

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