Photo of the Week: Mar. 2, 2008

HOW I GOT THE SHOT: One of my favorite spring haunts is Har Socho, also known as Givat Haturmusim or, in English, Lupines Hill, off route 375 in the Ela Valley near Beit Shemesh. A popular hiking spot for families, the hill is an easy 10-minute ascent to one of the richest concentrations of wildflowers I have discovered in Israel. Although there are at least two dozen varieties growing there, the dominant flower is the purple lupine, seen here, which grows primarily on the top and southern slope. This photo is another example of how I try to merge land and sky into a unified composition. I love dramatic cloud formations as complements to the main subject. The position and length of the clouds in this image forced the vertical composition, and I chose a low camera angle which follows the slope of the hill down to the left, thereby creating a sweeping, almost circular motion from the stems and flowers up through the clouds. The low angle of view, as opposed to the angle most often used by photographers - shooting down from a standing position - offers a more detailed and engaging look at the flowers. By crouching down and shooting up, I was able to extend the tops of the uppermost flowers above the horizon line and into the sky, which brings together the two main elements of the photo.

Photo of the Week: Feb. 24, 2008

HOW I GOT THE SHOT – Environmental portrait photography is a process that takes time for the subject and location to gel into a unified whole. Although I had been envisioning this genre of photo for weeks before arriving on the mountain, I had less than five minutes to complete the shot and I struggled to find the proper perspective while standing on a steep, rocky slope at 14,600 feet. I tried a few shots with a wide angle lens, but the subject was too small, so I backed up the hill and switched to a 135mm telephoto and asked the subject to climb onto the rock. Zoom and telephoto lenses have the effect of compressing depth, which in this photo makes the clouds appear closer to the subject. I shot about a dozen frames from start to finish, each time moving up or down until I finally found a foothold at an angle that put the subject and the rock he was on above the lower bank of clouds in order to accentuate the feeling of standing astride the edge of the world. Finally, I placed the subject along the left third to give balance to the mass of clouds in the upper right of the frame.

Photo of the Week: Feb. 17, 2008

HOW I GOT THE SHOT – The road up to Mt. Hermon, the highest point in Israel, wraps around this hill, affording gracious views of this 13^th-century fortress from both above and below. I arrived early enough to catch the eastern flank illuminated by the first light of the day. I continued to shoot until the sun rose above the horizon and threw warm light onto the stones. I prefer this earlier shot, however, because I like the blue and purple hues of the Hula Valley stretching out in the distance. Once the sun got a little higher, those colors were replaced by a white haze and the contrast between the light on the fortress and the trees was too great for my camera to handle. Exposing properly for the stones caused the trees to turn black and lose much of their detail, which is preserved in this lower contrast image. I would normally try to avoid centered compositions, but the triangular shape of the hill gives the photo a solid foundations to rest upon. The triangle is one of the strongest compositional shapes and I look for them in a variety of photos, from landscapes to group portraits.

Photo of the Week: Feb. 10, 2008

HOW I GOT THE SHOT: Israel turns the corner very quickly from winter to spring, a season highlighted by vivid displays of wildflowers throughout the country. Beginning in mid-February and continuing well into May, a variety of colorful wildflowers make their appearance in Israel following the winter rains. I had the good fortune to pass this site while en route to a beach along Israel's southern coast near Ashkelon. I spent the night camped nearby and returned to photograph the next morning. To take this photo, I had to traipse about 100 meters through waist-high grass wet with dew to obtain a vantage point that obscured the road and a series of power lines running alongside the field. Israel is a small country and there are few places where the works of man don't intrude upon the natural scenery. The early morning light gives the grass a golden glow, which nicely complements the red poppies. I chose a wide angle lens to take in as much of the scene as possible, maximize depth of field, and emphasize the feeling of standing in a wide open space. The long cloud mass hovering over the field, another small stroke of luck, rounds out the composition.

Photo of the Week: Feb. 3, 2008

No story is complete without a few small details to add color to the bigger picture. Photographic details can also speak volumes about a larger story. Learning to see those details and extract them from the surrounding visual noise is one of the keys to honing picture-taking skills. This simple image jumped out at me as I explored my garden following two days of wind, cold rain, hail, and finally snow. The bigger pictures of whitened hillsides and rows of cars buried in newly fallen powder seemed less intriguing then this single nuance of a weather event that dominated our lives for three days. I composed the shot to isolate the glass ornament against a background of tree branches. Later, in Photoshop, I removed the yellow hues in the background to make it appear black and white. I used to practice the lost art of colorizing black and white photos and still admire this effect when done with care and subtlety in a few select images. The absence of color elsewhere in the photo makes the subject appear that much more striking, bold, and, I think, beautiful.

Photo of the Week: Jan. 27, 2008

HOW I GOT THE SHOT: I came upon this scene about a month ago after finishing a photo session with a boy donning tefillin for the first time. About 100 young Haredi boys had gathered at the Kotel for morning prayers. I was drawn to them as I watched their Rav lead them in reciting the various prayers out loud in unison. This shot illustrates my approach to photographing sensitive subject matter. There are two issues at play here: First, the boys are in the midst of prayer, and out of respect, I didn't want to disturb them. Secondly, I have always found it more difficult to photograph members of the Haredi community. They simply don't want to be photographed, although this is less true for children than adults. Whenever I encounter a sensitive photographic situation, I always make my intent to photograph known and if I am waved off, I turn away and look for another opportunity. More often than not, however, people are flattered when you take an interest in them, and expressing a desire to take their picture often warms them up to the photographer. These boys looked at me curiously, but were devoted enough to their prayers to ignore me.
I kept a respectful distance from the group and chose a 200mm zoom lens, which has the effect of compressing the depth in the photo, thereby making the boys in the rear appear a little closer to the front row. Out of habit when shooting children, I crouched down on one knee to bring the camera to a lower height. I fired off 2-3 frames and disappeared. I cropped the final image just a bit to bring the boys edge to edge, an effect I've mentioned before that gives the photo a sense of expansiveness beyond what is visible.

Photo of the Week: Jan. 20, 2008

HOW I GOT THE SHOT: One of the inherent dangers of being a photographer is that while driving, I often spend more time admiring the landscape than the road. This orchard caught my eye one day while driving up the road from Beit Shemesh to Gush Etzion and I tracked down the exact spot a few days later. The image evolved through several efforts to bring the three main elements - the grassy foreground, the pink blossoms, and the blue mountains and sky - into proper balance and perspective. Typically, my mobility was limited by the contours of the surrounding landscape. I wanted to maintain a slight elevation above the foreground to give the photo better depth, but there wasn't much room to maneuver without losing height. The best angle I could find still left the line of pink trees somewhat thinner and less dominant in the photo than what I could see as I walked around the orchard. In the end, the bold, complementary colors combine with the movement of the photo from lower right to upper left corner to pull the photo together into a successful composition.