There are no rules

Here's the story of a picture that shouldn't work.  Meaning, it defies a few conventional "rules" of photography.  I call this one "Soulmates" because it's 2 trees growing together, kind of becoming one (awwwww).


I've mentioned before that I'm in a band (at the time of this picture, it was a full-time band) and we travel a little bit.  Not a whole lot, but maybe 10 weeks a year we go out of town.  Every time we do, I take my camera with me and usually just drive around and/or walk around taking pictures of things.  Sometimes I have an idea of where I'm going but most of the time I just go places and pull off the road somewhere and get out and walk around until I find something interesting.


This particular morning, I woke up and left the hotel early enough to catch the sunrise the morning of this picture.  I drove around trying to find a good spot to get the sun coming up above the horizon but because I really had no idea where I was, I couldn't find a good spot, so I missed the sunrise.  I was quite frustrated.  I'm never up early enough to actually see the sun coming up over the horizon, but made it a point to get out and get somewhere early enough to see it.  Not to mention it was cold and windy.  The temperature was somewhere in the 20's (if you're not from the south, that's cold down here).


Well, I kept driving around and eventually ran across a golf course.  There was frost all over the grass. . .the fairways and greens were beautifully covered in a frosty dew and I couldn't resist getting a picture of it.  So I drive up to this golf course like I own the place.  I walk out onto the green and get a picture of the lone flag on the frozen green of an obviously unplayable course.  As I walk around a little, I eventually find a water hazard (a pond for you non-golfers) than ran the entire length of what looked like the first hole.  There was another fairway on the opposite side of this water hazard, so I knew at this point I'd be much more successful taking pictures rather than playing golf here.


The water was about halfway frozen.  And by halfway I mean I'd throw a rock out onto the ice and it would slide until it got about halfway across the water then it was fall into the water.  Really interesting that it was frozen that way.  So I took some pictures of that.  None of my pictures at this point were blowing me away.


So it's coming up on about 9:00 and the sun's been up for, I don't know, maybe an hour or something.  I know that with every minute I'm losing my chances of getting something with that magical first few hours of sunlight.  Then I see these two trees.  Well, like I always do, when I see something beautiful, I attack it!!  I took pictures up close, far away, all kinds of stuff.  I got some from behind the shadow of the trees (the sun being blocked by the tree), I got some with the sun to the left, to the right, with the sun out of the frame, all kinds of stuff.  But none of them were really getting what I wanted.


That's when I laid down on the frost-laden fairway.  My goto pose.  Laying on the ground.  Still, nothing was coming off looking what I thought was spectacular.  I got lots of good shots.  How could you take a bad picture of two trees growing up together looking like one tree? I mean, other than the fact that there are 2 trunks, the way the branches are growing makes it look like it's one tree.  Freaking awesome.


Well, eventually I decided to put the trees out of focus.  I focused on a spot in the fairway about 75 feet (it doesn't look that far in the picture) in front of the trees. . .BAMM!!!


So there are a few rules, or maybe guidelines in photography about composition:


1.) Generally speaking you don't want to center your subject.  Giving it room on either side of the picture usually makes for a more compelling composition.
2.) The horizon should never (almost never) be in the center of the image.'
3.) You want your subject in focus (duh!!).


In this particular shot, the subject is out of focus, centered, and the horizon is (pretty much) centered.  So I'm kind of breaking 3 pretty important rules here with this picture.  But I like it.  And there may be a better way to photograph these trees.  But for me, this works.  It might be freaking awesome to zoom out, put the trees in the bottom left corner and just have a huge expanse of sky conquering the middle, upper, and right sections of the frame.  I probably took that picture actually.  But this is the one that I liked the most.


So ne ne na boo boo to all your photography rules (guidelines).


Given the length of this entry, there's sure to be grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors.  Sorry about that.


Thanks!!