If only I’d just

Do you ever look back at a photo you’ve taken and think to yourself:

“If only I’d just [ ___ Insert Blank ___ ]”

Because I do!

More often than I’d like too.

However, this photo is one of my worst cases.

“If only I’d just moved the camera to the left a bit”

Everything else about this shot was set up to be great. A beautiful warm glowing sunrise, a solitary, interestingly shaped barn, clouds creating patterns in the sky, long grasses being side-lit from the rising sun…

For some reason, though, I decided to stick the barn in the middle of the frame.

It must have looked good enough in my mind when I looked through the viewfinder.

But looking back now, I wish I’d placed it in the right third of the frame and included more of the sunrise clouds. Then they would have balanced each other out nicely.

I suspect I was suffering from the “photographers panic” and didn’t take the few moments I should have taken to assess the composition objectively.

To add insult to injury, I uploaded this to flickr way back when and it turned out being one of my most viewed images of all time (over 360,000 views and counting).

(I don’t know what it is about flickr, one of my worst ever photos for some reason managed to be seen over 1.3 million times on the site after Yahoo featured it on the flickr homepage… Why couldn’t they have picked one of my best shots? LOL)

Anyway, I guess there’s a little lesson in here somewhere about trying to take a moment to step back and really think about what’s in the frame whenever we are out shooting.

It's become a recurring theme in my emails these past few months because 1) I think it’s really important and 2) it’s something that doesn’t come naturally to me and I bet I’m not the only one.

It’s definitely a work in progress, but I am getting better at relaxing when behind my camera to take that extra moment and not succumb to the photographers panic!

Luckily for us, taking the shot is only half the job…

The other half is something you CAN go back and re-do if you spot a potential improvement…

And that’s your processing!

I quite enjoy going back and re-processing old shots just to see how they turn out. Sometimes they’re really similar, even though they’ve been processed years apart, thanks to following the same fundamental Photoshop workflow.

Others times if I decide to add some creative juice and deviate a little bit from the workflow, it can get really interesting!

If you’d like to learn my workflow and various techniques for yourself and use them to give your landscapes more punch…

Click here to see what's in my Luminosity Masking Mastery course along with a great bunch of extra bonuses.

See you there!

Talk soon

Steve