I’m not the world’s best photographer, but once in a while I get lucky. Some of my favorite pictures, such as the one that adorns my computer monitor right now, are accidental. My computer “wallpaper” is an interesting shot of a lovely lichen covered rock jutting out into Lake Superior.
I didn’t set out to take a scenery photo. I was at Lutsen Resort with two of my grandkids this weekend to take pictures of the wild and crazy Wave Dash, part of the Lake Superior Storm Festival. I took almost 100 pictures of people tiptoeing or splashing into the freezing cold lake for the story about the Storm Festival.
I’ve learned that that is sometimes the trick to capturing the flavor of an event. Set the camera on a continuous shooting mode and fire away. Keep clicking and you’ll catch your subject in action.
Of course you’ll have dozens of photos to go through and half of them can go directly to the trashcan, but patiently sifting through the shots will usually find one worthy of keeping. I like a lot of the pictures I’ve taken using that method.
But I love the ones that happen haphazardly, like my lake shot. After the excitement of the Wave Dash, I decided to let my grandkids check out the bridge over the Poplar River. We crossed the river and decided to hike the “Lake Loop,” a narrow, somewhat treacherous path that follows the river upstream to another little pedestrian bridge. The views are stunning and I took many pictures of both bridges, of the riverbank, of upstream and down. I took pictures of the grandkids sitting on the bridge with the Poplar River behind them. It’s hard to take a bad picture in such a scenic spot.
As we worked our way back to the lodge and the parking lot, I noticed the pretty scene that now graces my computer. I snapped a couple of frames and we headed home.
It turns out that the last couple of photos I took, the totally unplanned and not carefully considered shots were my favorites of the day.
There is a lot going on in the photo—the rock shines black as coal where the waves have washed over it. Orange lichen glows on the rock where it meets the shore. It complements the remnant of orange leaves clinging tenaciously to a scraggly bush and the golden dried grass on the hillside. The water dances around the rock, clear enough to see other, smaller, rocks on the lake bottom. It splashes and foams adding the whitest of white to the tableau. And in the left corner, there is a whimsical little whirlpool as the water swirls around yet another rock.
I probably should take a photography course someday to really become proficient at taking pictures. But I’m hesitant to do so. There is something to be said for figuring things out yourself, by trial and error—and by taking hundreds of photos.
And it is just plain fun to discover those serendipitous shots.
The virtue of the camera is not
the power it has to transform the
photographer into an artist, but
the impulse it gives him to keep
on looking.
Brooks Atkinson
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