Once upon a time, this was the bottom of a sea. Sediments flowed down the rivers and emptied into the sea, falling to the bottom in layers. Nearby volcanoes occasionally poured lava into the sea, boiling water to steam and quickly cooling the lava into hard rock.  Tectonic plates collided with such force that the land buckled and rose.  When the world froze in ice ages, great glaciers carved out broad, U-shaped valleys as they flowed slowly, slowly downhill, carrying pieces of the mountains with them.

Today, rivers continue to carve those channels deeper and narrower, rushing and tumbling in whitewater rapids and waterfalls. The rivers are fed by the last of those ancient glaciers, and by each winter’s snowfall. Forests of pine trees blanket the lower slopes in green, and the wind wears away at the barren peaks, so high and cold that only the most determined little plants can grow there.

Even 16 years after this picture was taken (in the summer of 1995), Glacier Park stands out in my mind as one of the most beautiful places on earth.

I started calling this my “postcard picture” as soon as I saw it. Finally, more than a decade later, it is. It’s available as a postcard on Zazzle.

Elemental, 1995

Let’s begin at the beginning, shall we?

In the age of modern cameras, with auto-focus and light sensors and zoom at the touch of a button, we can largely skip the discussion about focal length and aperture and shutter speed and ISO. If you really want to know about that stuff, there are a thousand books to pick from.  Likewise, I’m assuming you already know the basics of operating your camera. You know how to turn it on, how to point it at your subject, and how to take the picture. Let’s move along to the good stuff: how to take better pictures.

Composition is King

There are many aspects to good photography, but the most important of all is composition.

At its most basic, composition can be boiled down to two questions:

• What  is in your picture?
• Where is it?

This ranges from the very simple stuff (like paying attention to what’s in the background) to the somewhat-obscure (like the rule of thirds). Let’s start simple and work our way up, shall we?

What is in your picture?

When you’re holding your camera up, ready to take a picture, take a moment to pause and really look at the scene.

• Is there anything in the background that you don’t want to include?If you’re taking someone’s picture, look at what they’re standing in front of.The internet is full of examples where the photographer didn’t pay attention to this, and you end up with a lovely picture of a jet of water coming out of someone’s ear.Look for anything that would distract from your subject, and try to minimize or eliminate those distractions.  Unless they’re part of the scene, of course!  There’s some you’ll want to keep, but by pausing to look, you can make that decision.In this example, the table on the left, and some concrete pavers on the right distract from the intended subject of the picture: the dog!
  

  Doggie!

• Is there anything odd around the edges of the view? (someone’s elbow, a dog’s tail, the corner of a building, a piece of debris, a bright reflection)Odd things around the edges of an image draw the eye away from the main subject. At the least, they can be distracting, and at the most, they can make an otherwise very nice photo look hurried and amateur. Sometimes these can be cropped out later, but it’s better to eliminate them now, if you can. Take a step to the side, reframe the photo, and you may be able to eliminate them.In this example, a potentially very cool-looking storm cloud loses attention to a dinghy davit.  By moving to another location, or zooming in, this could have been avoided.
  

  Storm over Galveston Bay

• Are there important things missing?The classic example here is people missing body parts, but it can really be anything that you want in the picture that’s getting cut off, or anything that looks odd because it’s getting cut off.  For example, if you’re taking a picture of a building with a sign across the front of it, it may look odd to have the sign cut off.  Likewise, pay attention to whether you’re cutting off someone’s limbs. If they’re gesturing, make sure their hands are in the picture.  Don’t cut off the tops of heads, etc.In the picture of the dog, above, for example, I’ve managed to cut off her tail. While not the focus of the picture, it would have been better to reframe a little to get that in.

Coming up next time: Mixing Foreground and Background Objects

Stay tuned!

One after another, the sailboats parade out of the marinas, wind their way through the Kemah cut. They inch under the bridge, past the boardwalk, and out into the bay.  Here, they are surrounded by air and light and water.  Freedom and peace.

Parade to Sea

The wind blowing across the saltgrass prairie carries the scents of saltwater and mud. This far inland, there’s nothing fishy or unpleasant about the odor; it’s just a tang to remind you where you are. Blowing across the ponds cools the wind, too. At midday, resting in the shade, the wind feels almost chill against my skin, like standing a few feet away from an open refrigerator.

Apart from the sound of the wind, the only noises out here belong to the birds and bugs. Birds chirp and whistle and caw to each othre as they hunt in the reeds and socialize on the tops of bushes. They are a raucous bunch, and largely drown out the humming of insects.

These ponds are also home to alligators, though I’ve seen only one today.  There is a quiet menace to these beasts; they seem so slow and placid, and yet I know them to be fast, deadly predators. I gave him a wide berth and moved on.

This place is beautiful, in the way any prairie is beautiful: in the colors and textures that lay against each other in waves. Green and yellow grasses topped with red-brown shoots or golden seed stalks. Cattails and reeds giving way to saltgrass and shrubs. Small wildflowers in yellow and red and pink popping up along the roads, and farther inland, stands of scrubby trees.

It hasn’t rained for a month or more, now, and many of the ponds are dry, or little more than mudholes. I shall have to return when the rains do, and see this place in another season.