Showing Nature Throughout the Day

Showing Nature Throughout the Day

I have long thought about how we as nature photographers show nature. How we do this is important because we all become the "eyes" of the public, no matter where our photos are used, displayed or shown.

A challenge, though, is showing nature fully. A good example of this is landscapes and early and late light. Those are great times for landscape photography. I love being on location at the "magic hour" and seeing the light and shadow play out across the scene.

But nature doesn't just happen during those times. Unfortunately, getting interesting photos of nature at other times can be challenging. Night photography has gotten easier, but a lot of night life, such as bats, goes unseen by most people, including us photographers. Photographing during times of day away from sunrise and sunset often provides harsh, unappealing light, yet that's part of nature, too. Ansel Adams used to photograph throughout the day, and black-and-white can be one helpful approach to conditions that are poor for color. Still, I have seen places that are very interesting during the day, yet frustrating to photograph.

A good example is the desert. I have often traveled through the Mojave Desert in California on the way to someplace else, though I have spent a little time photographing in the wonderful Mojave National Preserve and in Death Valley. But a lot of the Mojave is very intimidating in its open, dry, hot spaces, especially to a guy who grew up in Minnesota.

I was driving through the Mojave this week and when I stopped for a break, I also stopped and thought about what was around me. It was mid-afternoon, not a time nature photographers usually photograph a landscape (me included), yet here I was challenged by an expansive landscape that really said Mojave Desert to me.

I had to try. So I found a spot that had an expansive view of the area. And at first, it was hard to make anything of it. It was just a big area of space at a hot time of day. I used a wide-angle lens to allow me to stretch the space and emphasize that space. I found that including more sky was helpful to add color but it also gave the feeling of big, empty space.

I tried working some distinctive plants into the shot to give the composition some structure. I tried including some telephone poles small to give a feeling of isolation. I even tried a little black-and-white.

The photos aren't all "beautiful", but they do show how I felt about an intimidating, full of space desert. Sometimes I think it is worth stretching ourselves to show off nature that is not the "usual" in photography.

All of these were shot, by the way, with an iPhone and the Moment wide-angle lens.