Posts Tagged ‘coastal’

Analysis Paralysis | Tech Tuesday

Outer Banks North Carolina

Analysis Paralysis will sometimes stall a creative process. It has been a while since I have posted! We have been busy with a lot of events, and we even took some time to go on some trips all around the country. I am back and finally getting some time to go through the photos. While going through the photos, I recall a question that my cousin asked as we were walking around his city. He asked – how do you find better landscape compositions?

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse - ©TimeLine Media
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse – ©TimeLine Media

I believe it is a combination of just shooting, and refining. Trying to overthink a photo when you arrive to a location can really take away from your enjoyment of your visit. Also, it may prevent you from getting any images at all! If it is a popular tourist, or familiar landmark like these North Carolina coastal lighthouses, you have a lot of images in your mind already. I always take these classic or overdone photos if I can to add them to my personal collection. But then, I use the digital tools, the back of the camera to review and get a better images before I leave the location. Here we found a nice dune overlooking the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. My first thought was to use my ultra wide lens to get a lot of the sky with the lighthouse in the far background.

Cape Hatteras through wide angle lens - ©TimeLine Media
Cape Hatteras through wide angle lens – ©TimeLine Media

Working a Scene

Not good. You can’t even see the lighthouse and the frame is dominated by large areas of sand and coastal grasses. I did not see anything that was worth trying again, so I changed lenses. I wanted to bring the lighthouse to a more prominent part of the frame, so I put the 105mm lens onto the camera.

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse - ©TimeLine Media
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse – ©TimeLine Media


This is better. The lighthouse is larger in the frame, but I now see new distractions. There is a paved parking lot for visitors, and a radio tower both of which I did not even see in the first attempt. At least I solved how I wanted the lighthouse to look in the frame. Now I just needed to move my position slightly to move the distractions out of the frame.

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse - ©TimeLine Media
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse – ©TimeLine Media


Crouching in between the coastal grasses gave me this frame. Most of the distractions are out of the way. I like how the out of focus coastal grasses are leading your eyes to the lighthouse that is rendered sharply. But a few of the tips are a little too large, so they can take the attention away.

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse - ©TimeLine Media
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse – ©TimeLine Media


Just moving a few feet allowed me to find my final position. Nothing is blocking the body of lighthouse, and all the grasses are a consistently small size in the photo. I did have to crop a little from the left to completely get rid of the radio tower, but I am happy how this turned out. I really enjoyed making this image, but spent a lot of the rest of the day painfully picking out “hithchikers” that grabbed onto my sneakers.

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