The Art of Noticing - Woodland Photography with a Nikon D750

Sometimes it's a struggle to find image ideas. I can't find creative compositions. I just can't see the wood from the trees today. How on earth are you supposed to find mushrooms in all of this? There is a difference between looking and seeing. Seeing involves focus, exploration and curiosity. Learning to observe the world, to pay attention to things most people would overlook. Connecting to your surroundings can improve creativity. Tips I generally give for approaching locations is to slow down, allow yourself the time to explore, to investigate the elements in your surroundings and work on visualising images before you've taken your camera out of your bag. In The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker, a book that I just started to read, this is called Conscious Noticing. The aim of the book is to take you through a series of exercises to help you cultivate an original perspective and a distinct point of view of the world, whether you are a photographer, a graphics designer, an artist or somebody who just wants to be a little more present in day-to-day life. As photographers, we're always looking for unique subjects and compositions, especially in popular landscape photography locations and woodlands like this, where it's extremely, extremely messy and busy and there's a lot to work with. I thought I would do some of these exercises on location with you guys, not only to improve my own seeing skills but you might find them motivating or interesting, useful in some way. Oh look, there's a little mushroom! Wow, this pathway is fantastic. Oh wow, look at the size of those mushrooms! We're definitely going to come back and photograph this pathway at some point, maybe not in this video but definitely soon. Right now the sun's sort of over that way and it's not coming through, it's not really hitting this spot so yeah. What a find though, what a find! One of the first tasks in the book is to create a mental search, to look for things that you tend to overlook when you're out doing photography or to set a task to find something specific and photograph it. I look for red telephone boxes when I'm out and about, whether I'm walking, doing photography, driving and after starting that mental search, I started it months ago, I find them everywhere and actually on my way into the forest today I drove past one that I must have driven past hundreds of times and never noticed it until today. I now also spot mushrooms everywhere, no matter how big or small they are. I remember one day standing in this very bitter forest looking around, not really seeing anything, especially on the ground. I then took a second deeper look and realised the ground was littered with mushrooms, blending into the leaves, into the moss, the earth, so easy to overlook if I was distracted or focused on something else. So I started to look for them and as I did I began to learn where I'm more likely to find them, what types of fungi grow in certain parts of the forest, what shapes and colours to look for and now they will naturally catch my eye even if I'm not looking for them. The process is informative and I find fungi searching very addictive. Seeing as I want to exercise my intimate seeing skills, I think I'm going to go with the idea of photographing and looking for things that are on trees and that have come from trees. I kind of like that theme and it's vague enough to give me room to experiment and photograph a few different subjects I think, so we're going to explore and see if we can find something within that realm. I don't think it's going to be too difficult but yeah, let's see if we can get one or two images within that theme. I always stop to take a look at this tree whenever I pass it on this trail. There are quite a few fallen trees over here. Oh wow, look at all the mushrooms growing off the roots on this tree. You can always trust me to find a mushroom. This one here has caught my attention and it's fairly accessible as well so I think that I could probably frame this one up and photograph it but I do like how you can see through the tree past it to the other side as well. My original idea for this image was to go wide so that you could see that this mushroom was in between a hole in this tree trunk but actually when you go wide there's way too much sort of empty space that's not really doing a whole lot and your eye doesn't really have anywhere to go on the other side of this tree so I'm going to cut out all of that unnecessary space, crop in closer and just focus on this mushroom. I am focused stacking eight to ten images for this, maybe a couple more and I like getting up close while I'm doing that because this mushroom looks as though it's sprinkled in sugar so you get to see all those tiny textures that you really can't see with your eye when you're just looking at it normally. There is the tiniest leaf which I presume it's on a spider's web. I can't actually see, I can't see the web full stop so it just looks like this tiny leaf is just flinging around in the wind in the middle of the air like magic. It's so bizarre but it's moving around so much that there is honestly no hope of photographing it. It's actually really fun when you stop and just look at trees, there's so much going on. I found this on the floor as well, even bark that's just fallen off trees and is rotting on the ground can be interesting. I mean this mushroom looks a little rough, it's past its best but look at that. One thing that I would love to photograph at some point are these little sprouts that I always find coming out of the moss on trees and branches but I'd like to do it after there's either been rain or sort of it's been a dewy frosty morning where you've got moisture clinging to them. I think that could be really really cool. I found this bit of lichen and it's, it stands out so much on the floor here because it's so, it's almost white, it's so bright and it just contrasts with all of these subdued earthy tones of all of these leaves surrounding it, the soft oranges, browns and greens we've got. I'm going slightly wider and including a lot of these leaves in the image, we've got some soft light coming through now which might be quite nice on these leaves. Just add a splash of colour, a hint of colour and I'm gonna experiment with my crop in post processing. I'm not sure about a square crop, it could be interesting but I can't try that out on at the 750mm and cutting off the top and bottom might be something that I do and I'm gonna add sort of a subtle natural or natural looking vignette so that it sort of draws your eye into the middle of the image towards this lichen here but this is, yeah, this is an interesting shot and well spotted by me. Let me know what you think though. Unfortunately it's not sunset but the sun has dropped low enough to the point where the light is no longer coming through the trees so it's getting quite dark and dull in here so unfortunately we're going to put the camera away for today but this exercise so far has been quite useful. I was definitely starting to consciously notice smaller finer details and pick out things, not even just on trees and things that have come from trees, just in general in the forest so yeah we will continue this exercise or similar exercises in the future I think and otherwise coffee, yes my coffee is in the car, I left it in there. I am not running on a full cup of coffee today so I'm gonna go finish my coffee. So thank you so much for watching this video and I'll see you next time!