The Importance Of An Anchor - Why A Foreground Matters
Most everyone is familiar with the concept of an anchor in the nautical sense. The anchor keeps the vessel from drifting away, due to current or wind. It fixes the vessel to a certain position. While this is easily understood, fewer people are aware of the need for a similar concept in photography.
I enjoy using wide angle lenses for landscape photography, but I also recognize that a wider focal length brings additional compositional challenges. While a wide focal length can produce visually exciting images, it can also produce really boring, empty feeling images. The nature of wide angle lenses is that they create the feeling of space, of distance. That distance can really disconnect the viewer from your subject, if you are not careful. When using a wide focal length, it becomes incredibly important to anchor your image with a strong foreground.
The trailhead in the foreground of this image, leads you into the grander scene.
The nature of a wide angle means that it distorts the perspective of the objects, closest to the camera. There is a feeling of distance from your background, so the eye needs something closer to engage it, before moving on to the grander scene beyond. I’m sure you’ve seen visually stunning images of famous mountain ranges, sunsets, waterfalls, or wild natural scenes. I’m willing to be that your favorites all feature a small scale object in the foreground. Patterns in the ice or snow, wildflowers, rocks, or fallen autumn leaves. These serve as the visual anchors of the scene. Without them the image becomes much more boring, and far less grand.
There are many beautiful places on our planet, but photography, much like everything else, is very trendy. It is rare that you have an opportunity to capture something that has never been photographed before. The challenge then, is to find a way to set your work apart from the crowd. Anchoring your image through something unique is one of the key ways to accomplish this. Take for example, the new One World Trade Center in New York City. It has an incredible amount of emotional capital invested in it, because of the events of September 11th, 2001. So, it’s been photographed hundreds of thousands of times already since its completion. I wanted something different, and I saw the opportunity while in Battery Park further up Manhattan Island. Green space is at a premium in the big city, so when I saw an opportunity to shoot the tower, with the anchor of some flowers in the park in the foreground, I jumped on it, and am happy to have a different perspective on a familiar sight (image below).
