Are all the photographs you take a work of art? I affirm that they are not. However, there are certainly photographs that are works of art. I have looked at the famous photographs by Ansel Adams and others from the golden age of photography that had the ability to capture, in an instant, an image that lasts forever. I once saw an exhibit of Adams’s iconic image of “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” with various versions of the photo developed by Adams over the years. Each image was slightly different, but each showed the haunting beauty of a cemetery in a New Mexico town with the moon illuminating the scene. Sometimes he dodged or burned the clouds and the light from the crosses in one way and other times in another, but he always delivered beauty to the picture.

While you or I may never take as good a photograph as Ansel Adams, we can all strive to capture light on camera and develop it in a way that touches the heart of the viewer. Our goal should be to take a photograph that provokes a visceral feeling in the viewer. So how do we turn a mother’s snapshot into a work of art?

A photograph begins long before you click the shutter.

I think you have to see the photograph in your mind before you take the camera out of the bag. You need to walk around the scene. Try to visualize the photograph, looking at the subject from different angles, positioning your point of view up and down, from kneeling on the ground to climbing a tree or a ladder. Move around the scene to see what’s in the background and in the foreground. Move fifty feet to the left or right to see if the image “pops” into your field of view.

Use other tools to help you prepare the shot. I have an app on my iPhone that tells me when the moon will rise and set and the different phases of the moon. I often check this app, even before I head out, to determine the best day and/or time of day to shoot. I have another iPhone app that waypoints (the precise location) of my location. I use this reference point to encode the photo with longitude and latitude so that the exact spot I was standing at can later be located in Google Earth.

let there be light

It is commonly understood that there are only two good times of the day to take pictures. These are the times around sunrise and sunset and are known as the “Golden Hour”. Some photographers reduce that time to about ten minutes of perfect light with the sun low on the horizon. You will often see a golden glow in photos taken at this time of day. The scene and location will dictate when the light is perfect. If you are in a mountain canyon, light may not hit the trees until later in the morning. You may need to wait for the light to hit a particular part of your scene, or to illuminate specific parts of your scene, such as the leaves on a tree.

Of course, some rules are made to be broken. Some of my best shots happened when the sun came out from behind a cloud to illuminate my scene.

Often times, the photograph you think you took may look a little different when viewed on the big screen, and sometimes there is something in the background or foreground that messes with the intended shot. However, from time to time, he may see some grandeur that wasn’t evident in the viewfinder, but was captured in his image. I once took photos of a tennis match where the player was moving very fast while shooting on full auto and I didn’t see until later that I had captured the tension in his face with bulging veins on his neck that looked like they were about to burst. . On closer inspection, I realized that it wasn’t the movement of the ball, but the intensity of the players’ swing along with the lines and the sweat on his face that created the magic in the image.

After visualizing your scene, proceed to take your camera out of your bag, place it on the tripod, set the shutter speed and f stop, and then release the shutter. And this is how you create a photograph that is much more than just a snapshot.