Look for the low angle!
Sometimes, shooting from a different angle will open your eyes to a new composition you had never thought of before. During a recent vacation to the Asheville, NC area, I was chasing some spectacular cloud formations across the sky, trying to find an interesting foreground to use to frame my shot. While clouds can sometimes make great photos by themselves, I was looking for something to remember my vacation by and was in search of something interesting to put in the foreground. We found this little historical park at the site of the old Zeb Vance homestead and seeing this combination of old log homes and rustic fences caused me to swerve into their parking lot.
I was using my circular polarizer to give me a spectacular blue backdrop for the clouds (and to add more saturation to the greens), but I still wasn’t happy with the shot…that is, until I bent down to get a different lens from my bag. Looking up from that low angle, I saw this mirrored composition of the spit-rail fencing against the mountains in the distance and immediately had an “aha!” moment. I swapped lenses (I used a 24-70mm zoom for this) and got down to ground level. I mean all the way down! Lying on my side, I fired off 10 or 15 shots. In a few minutes, the clouds moved on and so did I…happy that I took the “low road” to get this photograph.
