Location! Location! Location!

I was going over some shots I did with Krista a few weeks ago, and remembered how she said:

- When you look at the pictures, you can never tell if it was done right here!

That's so true...

When I was just "taking pictures" - years back - I'd try to photograph a location first, then a person in it. Like all tourist shots - here I am visiting waterfalls, here I am near the statue of liberty, here I am in the desert... etc. Composition was totally different.

But now that I'm "photographing" portraits, I'm using only one element of the location. A line that leads here, the way the light falls, the way the texture can be used, etc.

So, you can rarely tell which location was used on what photographs, unless the elements are so striking that your eye recognizes them right away. Architecture is that way. But in nature, you can never tell :)

There's a lot of elements that come together here... a lot to think about when you plan a shot like this one:

Of course it doesn't help when you photograph a child, as they are very impatient, so this wasn't exactly a planned shot. It was simply something I saw and jumped up to photograph, even though I was totally busy with photographing someone else :).

But when you have a grownup person to photograph, you can plan pretty much anything, as long as location provides interesting light, textures, structures, lines, depth, etc.

Thank you, Krista, for lending your gorgeous blue eyes to please my lens :)