Creative paths
Tidying your compositions is an art form that’s simple in concept, but difficult to master
Keep it simple, stupid! Michael explains how to dumb-down your framing and utilize straightforward shots
The idea of clean photography is striking, simple and subtle; there’s nothing complicated about clean. In its usual sense, it has everything going for it and no argument against it. Who wants to be messy? In art however, because it applies to more than just photography, it’s a little bit different.
There are many valid artistic styles, including those that verge on messy (or are at least loose); some of William Eggleston’s work, for example. The reason being is that creativity depends more on challenging preconceptions and being interesting rather than ticking boxes and being orderly.
Nevertheless, as I hope to show you over the next six pages, clean is a way of thinking and shooting that can be applied to almost any style of photography, and can deal with even busy scenes. It does not mean trying to be minimalist. Certainly, if you have a simple scene in front of you with few elements, and you shoot it in a way that simplifies everything, then it’s easier to be clean. We looked at this back in N-photo 73 with reducing your frame. But clean shooting is broader than this, and it starts with an attitude in mind.
The first principle is to strip away all inessentials in the photograph, and the second is that everything in the frame has to contribute to the final image. The result is that nothing distracts from your idea of what the photograph is about. That all sounds fine in principle, but how do you achieve this? Let’s take the above image and the scene it was created from as an example.
This is Dedham Vale – Constable country – on the Essex-suffolk border, and it was my assignment. I had a stroke of luck with fog early on a summer morning; I needed to exploit this to make the most of it. Obviously there’s tons of atmosphere, providing the fog lasted, but I also wanted a striking and clean result. This is the River Stour, so I wanted to show that there’s a river and a riverbank. The old oak trees were an important part of the content, but the clean way to include them was to isolate just one while having a hint of the others. This meant first finding a characterful tree, and then being at the right camera distance for the fog to isolate it. It also suggested shooting into the sunlight for maximum graphic contrast. The composition needed a certain rigour as well, to include only what was needed.
Get the subjects correct
There were three things: riverbank, characterful-old-tree and a subtle hint of other trees. The illustration (to the right) shows these subjects, and also that there were other image qualities that needed ‘cleaning’, including smooth background tonal range and a gradation over a limited colour palette; from warm sunlight to cool shadow. The solid black
silhouette of the foreground bank and the hint of ripples are just enough to establish the river (1 in the illustration), while the tree (2) neatly fills the left half of the frame, while the shadowy soft outline of other trees (3) gives atmospheric depth.
The key takeaway from this ‘clean photography’ approach is that first you have to know what you want before you can start to work on the framing, composition, lighting, timing and so on.
You may have plenty of time – in this instance you have minutes – or just a very brief assessment in a fast-moving situation, but the principle remains the same. Indeed, it really benefits from thinking, and as such is probably best suited to subjects where you do have some time and control, but as I’ll show on the following pages, you can apply this approach to situations that call for slightly faster reactions. The three main elements that the image needed to get across were the riverbank (1), the old oak tree (2) and hint of more trees behind (3). The composition needed to be clean, as did the smooth tonal gradation and the soft palette of pink through blue