Shoot Through It!

Some of my most frequent advice is to shoot through a scene. As a younger photographer, I would give up too easily and put the camera down too quickly when my efforts weren’t met with immediate success. “It’s not working,” I would say, when the truth was closer to “I’m not working.” I wasn’t giving the scene the time and effort it almost always needs to be coaxed away from the obvious. Or worse, I’d get what I thought was “the shot” and then move on to something else, missing all that was to come. That has changed over the years, and I think much of the credit for my best work belongs more to my patience and perseverance than whatever talent I might have. What I have learned is to shoot through a scene quite faithfully. But this isn’t about that. I’ve just returned from six weeks in southern Africa, shooting in forests, thickets, and SFG (Stupid F-ing Grass—a very technical term) that always seems to be in front of whatever beauty I have found. You spend hours looking for a subject,…