In real estate, their sell line is often "location, location, location." I've thought so many times that this is true of photography, too. I mean that type of location where the leaves are just red and yellow enough and the water is so blue you cannot look away and when the grass is trimmed just perfectly to not distract from the beauty of the child you're photographing. Then we began playing with greater, wider depths of field, meaning the background is thrown out of focus by having our lenses wide, wide open. And then ANY place became a potentially perfect place to shoot pictures!
Here are a few recent examples. When we arrived at this location as the sun was quickly setting, we first imagined ourselves frolicking through the creekbed to capture some fun fall water and tree shots... but the sun was hidden by the trees so as I looked around, I found this dead tree hanging over the old crumbling asphalt and some old, wilting yellow-brown leaves off in the distance. I called out to the kids, "hey, come over here. Don't worry about what's all around you, just talk with me over here!!" Their mom looked at me like, "so you think NOW is the time to play around with your camera, the sun is setting and we just don't have time for that ugly place!"
And then we wanted all three of these cuties together so we quickly plopped them down on a picnic table with the parking lot and baseball diamond and cars all behind them. It looked so terrible without any depth of field!
We did get some by the creek bed, too!
Now here, we were in a home that was full of Christmas decorations all over the floors and furniture as the family was in the midst of hanging their festive items all around the house. What would have been a terribly "busy" and unattractive backdrop for a picture turned out to be a fun play with color and shapes off in the fuzzy distance.
