Much of the advice for composition revolves around certain times of day (e.g. the Golden Hour or Blue Hour) or certain conditions (cloudy vs sunny, the angle of light, etc) in order to take interesting photos. To shoot during these conditions, you often need to devote a lot of time to planning and wait for just the right moment, but what if you don't have that kind of time? Often, your schedule may depend on other people or on other plans you have later which preclude you from sitting with your camera and tripod for hours. Can you still take interesting photos under these constraints, without the "ideal" conditions? The answer is "yes", though it requires practice and a keen sense of composition to find the creative shot. Let's examine some examples of how to practice what I call "incidental photography".
Daibutsu
When I visited the Daibutsu (Great Buddha) in Kamakura, Japan, many things about the scene were not ideal:
- there was a large crowd of people surrounding the statue
- the sun was high in the sky, meaning no interesting side-light or nice colors
- shadows were harsh
- I only had a brief window of time to take some shots
However, because it was the middle of the day, I knew I could shoot at low ISO which means no concerns about noise in the image. At first, I took the above shot. If I had stopped here, I would have failed to create an interesting composition because everyone who visits this site probably takes this exact shot; moreover it's filled with people. In a word, this shot is uninteresting. I then switched to my telephoto lens and got this much more interesting shot:
I love the detail on the statue and the fact that it isn't centered, adding interest to the image with the clouds floating by in the background. I continued to move around the space and then took this shot with a stone sign in the foreground:
Much better! This shot has several layers to it with the sign, the tree on the top-left, and the statue itself. Moreover, neither of these shots have people in them despite the crowds at this time! This series of photos is a good example of how you can take interesting photos, even under less-than-ideal circumstances.
Frozen Lake
The day I took this walk was very uninteresting - no colors in the winter, cloudy, and not much movement. However, processing this image in darktable helped make it a lot more interesting:
What I noticed when looking at this lake was the intriguing texture of the ice, but this wasn't really visible in the photo. To highlight these patterns, I used an instance of local contrast with a drawn mask over the frozen lake and dramatically increased the local contrast:
Moreover, I felt the cold but couldn't properly convey that feeling in the photo. To fix this, I increased the chroma and saturation on the master tab of the color balance rgb module (and adjusted the brilliance values to improve the contrast between the midtones and highlights):
I then added some blue to the midtones and highlights on the 4 ways tab:
To balance the cold of the lake, I used color equalizer to increase the saturation and brightness of the plants in the foreground. This creates a blue/orange complementary color harmony:
Finally, I increased the brightness in the shadows using the tone equalizer module:
The result is a more interesting image that more accurately conveys what I saw and felt in this scene.
Summary
Practicing incidental photography has both pros and cons:
Pros:
- requires less time
- can happen as part of a trip or outing for another purpose (e.g. a social gathering)
- helps improve your creativity as a photographer
- can set your photographic style apart
Cons:
- the light is less interesting/colorful
- smaller (or non-existent) shadows
- likely have to work around other people and time constraints
- you probably only have a subset of your equipment with you
Similar to shooting with a prime lens, incidental photography forces you to move around the scene and think about the composition from different perspectives and with a creative vision. In addition, it gives you more opportunities to practice your craft and get shots you would otherwise have missed.