KEEP IT SIMPLE

If a clean desk is a beautiful desk, mine is usually pretty ugly. The same rule applies to many photos. Too messy may tell the story of your son's bedroom, but it is not attractive. It is all too easy to be captivated by a magical sunrise, a bubbling stream, an enchanting forest or the geometric patterns of desert plants and forget about simplifying your composition. Not sizing up and simplifying the scene can result in a less than attractive result.

There are several methods to simplify a scene. These are clean up, staging and isolation. We will address each of these.

Clean up

It is quite rare to have a scene that includes foreground where some clean up won’t help. This means removal of intruding blades of grass, discarded pieces of paper, unattractive pebbles, footprints, dead leaves and the like to benefit the finished image. The rules for this include the mantra of founder of Nature First (Phill Monson) which is “Nature first, photography second.” In other words, do not damage anything that might affect the environment or the pleasure of other recreationists, including other photographers. 

In the raw image below, there are a number of distracting elements, including small rocks and foreground brush. It would have been acceptable to temporarily remove or reposition some of the loose rocks, but not the embedded ones. It also would have been acceptable to move closer to the edge of the cliff and pin back the brush (without breaking any branches) the from in front of the lens. In many situations such as this, you are never going to capture a wall worthy image, even with good post processing. Rather than waste your time moving things around, look hard for better vantage points that do not have the distractions.

In the scene below, it would have been possible to remove a couple of bright green leaves and the dead wood in front of the aspens that stand out in the first (raw) image. This would have violated the Nature First principle. Popular areas like this that get visited by hundreds of people every fall are especially subject to irreversible damage. I chose to leave the scene undisturbed (taken in 2016) and handled the distractions with selective sharpening and blurring and changes in the light in various regions of the print. 

So what is allowed? For me, this means I can remove any of the items listed above from my scene. But I can’t remove slow growing branches of trees, dislodge partially embedded rocks, build a dam in the stream or disturb ant hills. But I can pin a branch back temporarily with a clothespin, brush the sand with a whisk broom, remove some dead leaves or pine needles with tweezers or remove a white pebble from a display of all black pebbles if I replace these items when done shooting.

Much clean up work is possible in post processing, but certainly a lot easier before you make your captures. The more images you take with unnecessary inclusions, the more you will learn to be more selective in your compositions. 

When you have a great composition and can’t eliminate all the distractions, post processing can help. Tools available in many programs include distorting areas to move them out of the image, content aware replacement, healing and clone brushes and the stamp tool. The exact techniques for cleaning up images can be learned through tutorials or online lessons. How much you clean up an image depends on your own artistic interpretation and comfort level. For example, you may decide to clean up all the brown areas on a leaf, or you may feel it is more natural to leave a few blemishes. Whatever you decide, learn to do it with skill so your changes are undetectable by your audience. 

Staging

Homes are staged to help them sell. This presents the home to potential buyers in the best manner possible. Staging your photos will help them sell. For photography, staging refers to repositioning or adding objects to your scene. This may improve the lines flowing to your subject, provide an anchor or additional subject of interest or keep the object from being an edge distraction. In the image below, I found the dead wood in this location, which likely means another photographer placed it here. It was only necessary to reposition it slightly for my image. 

The best practice would have been for the previous photographer to replace the staged wood where it had been previously. In this case I was left with a choice of leaving it as I found it or placing it in a more natural setting.

It can be tempting to overdo it when staging. This happens frequently with leaves in fall color images. Turning every leaf right side up and pointing into the scene, or collecting leaves from a nearby location and placing them where they wouldn’t occur naturally can make your scene look contrived. The image below appears less contrived because the sycamore leaf is on top of sycamore roots where I found it. What you don't see is the many distracting elm leaves I removed from between the roots before making this capture.

Isolation

You may be fortunate enough to come upon a scene that could be termed minimalist. I dream of such compositions, but usually have to search them out. These scenes are already simplified for you. A snowy field or a black sand beach can help you find such scenes. A lone horse or tree silhouetted against an evening sky would be another example. Looking at minimalism scenes can help you learn to compose simpler scenes in more complex situations. This does not mean you always need to put single subjects in the corner of the frame as in the first image below, but learning to eliminate distractions around the oak tree in the second image made for a more compelling result.

More commonly we can use isolation to remove distracting elements from your scene by changing camera position, changing focal length or depth of field.

Be particularly vigilant about distractions along the edge of you compositions. While these may be rather easily treated in post processing, they are most ideally eliminated through one of the camera techniques listed above. Moving slightly closer to the subject or using a slightly longer focal length can remove those edge distractions. 

Background distractions and distractions at the same distance as your subject are the most difficult to eliminate. In landscape photography, we learn to make sharp images throughout the frame, but this is not a hard and fast rule. When there is a lot of clutter in the background, try taking images at a wider f/stop to blur the background. This technique can also be useful with distracting foregrounds, but blurriness in the foreground can be its own distracting element, so be careful with this. Instead, try recomposing or staging your composition by temporarily pinning back those foreground annoyances. Photographing plants that move can be particularly challenging. If you are able to focus stack, try limiting it to small field depths. The first image below is shot at a narrow f/stop (f/11). The second image has less disturbing elements and was taken at f/3.5.

So before you set up to capture that amazing scene, ask yourself these questions:

1. Are there distractions I can eliminate by cleaning up the scene?

2. Have I checked out all the potential angles and positions for my camera.

3. Am I at the best focal length?

4. Would this scene benefit from selective focus?

5. What do I expect to have to do in post processing?

These questions can help you improve your results by keeping it simple.