Whitney, Citronelle, Alabama   Click on image to view larger

Purchase This Week's Print Whitney, Citronelle, Alabama is available as an 11"x14" archival pigment print, matted to fit an 16"x20" frame. Each print is signed by the photographer and is accompanied by a display, care, and conservation document detailing the process behind the photograph.

Image of the Week Fine Art Print Offer Each week, I post an image from my recent or historical work and talk a little bit about it; the process, creative thought, and technical details that contributed to its creation. During the week an image is featured, I offer it as a Limited Edition Fine Art Print at a special price. Each image is printed personally by me on the latest Epson printers using archival pigment inks on acid-free archival paper. The prints are shipped matted and signed and can be framed using a standard size, off-the-shelf frame from your local frame shop. Learn more about my fine art printing process.

Image of the Week

Occam's Camera

Many of you may be familiar with the principle of Occam's Razor, a philosophical and scientific axiom that is best summarized as, "The simplest solution is usually the best." The principle espouses an economy of ideas to explain the unknown, encouraging one to whittle away the useless, the irrelevant, and the needlessly complex.

It's a great way to think about photographic composition.

If you think about a scene or subject as a problem and the photograph as a solution, then the Razor applies. The process of composing a photograph is nothing more than the stripping away of the extraneous image until you you are left with the core message -- the central idea -- the simplest idea -- of the scene.

The subject is the unstated message, the photograph is your voice. If you fail to strike a balance between including too much and too little, the photograph will fail; you might as well say nothing at all.

The uncropped photograph

This week's image was shot with a Hasselblad 500CM, a camera that produces a 6cm x 6cm square image. Shooting in square is convenient: you don't have to turn the camera on its side for vertical format. If you want a vertical or horizontal, you crop the square. I usually compose my images as squares shooting with this camera, but every so often I visualize alternate crops to enhance the subject's moment.

Compare the uncropped image (above, left) to my cropped version, and let me know what you think.

Technical Data

Whitney, Citronelle, Alabama was photographed with a Hasselblad 500CM and a Zeiss 80mm ƒ/2.8 T* lens on Kodak TMax 400 film (TMY-2). The exposure was 1/250 sec at ƒ/11.

Other Images of the Week