The Wild Photographer

When and How to "Break the Rules" and Think Different with your Wildlife, Landscape and Nature Photography

• Court Whelan • Episode 78

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In this episode of The Wild Photographer, Court follows up on his recent conversation about the “rules” of photography by exploring the equally interesting topic: when should we break them?

Photography rules exist for good reason. Things like the rule of thirds, sharp focus, proper exposure, level horizons, golden hour light, and clean composition all help us make stronger images more consistently. They give us a useful framework, especially when we’re learning or working quickly in the field. But as every photographer eventually discovers, those rules are not laws. They are shortcuts, not mandates.

At the end of the day, photography is art. A technically perfect image can fall flat, while a photograph that bends or completely ignores the rules can be the one that draws more attention and pop. Sometimes a slightly blurred subject, an "overly bright" exposure, a centered animal, a tilted horizon, or a chaotic scene full of visual clutter creates more feeling, more story, and more originality than the “correct” version ever could.

In this episode, Court walks through some of his favorite ways to break traditional photography rules with intention. He talks about exaggerated composition, center-weighted subjects, high-key and low-key exposure, motion blur, focusing somewhere other than the eyes, embracing bad weather, shooting at midday, experimenting with minimalism and maximalism, photographing the aftermath of a moment, and even leaning into star trails instead of trying to avoid them.

The big idea is not to throw every rule out the window and hope for the best. It’s to understand the rules well enough that you can recognize when breaking them might create a stronger photograph. When done thoughtfully, breaking the rules gives you more creative control and a way to make images that feel more personal, more memorable, and sometimes a whole lot more fun.

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Court Whelan (00:00)
Hey friends, welcome back to The Wild Photographer. I did an episode recently, which turned out to be quite popular on the 14 fundamental rules. I'm doing air quotes here around rules of photography. this episode is talking about how to break those rules. It's it's addressing the air quotes around rules because ⁓ the reality is that photography is art and breaking the rules is absolutely acceptable.

And encouraged to get your best work. I often like to think that, you know, to get a great photo, you've you've just gotta make the frame look good. And so these rules that we set out and you know sometimes or oftentimes abide by are really just shortcuts and kind of a checklist of how to make the photo look good. But there are absolutely ways to make the photo look good or great or superb well outside of those rules. So again,

this episode is all about times to break those rules. I came across a quote that I really like, and I don't know who this is attributed to, I'm sorry to whoever said this, but ⁓ it goes, A photograph can be technically imperfect and visually unforgettable. ⁓ now I want to underline that breaking the rules doesn't mean that you automatically have a technically imperfect photo, but I think it's just

The more I more I get into storytelling photography, the more I realize that it isn't actually the perfect technique or the perfect set of technical specs along the photo. It's the fact that that just has this jeunesse quoi. It is visually unforgettable. So again, I'm belaboring the point, but breaking the rules, A-oka. This is a guideline. The whole episode is a guideline of how you can become aware of breaking the rules of photography.

For your own enjoyment and your own success in your photographic pursuits.

Before I begin, I'd like to thank one of the sponsors of the show, MPB. And I am a gear nerd. You might be or might not be a gear nerd, but if you're a photographer, you you probably know what I mean when I say lenses and camera gear is just a necessary part of the equation. And for me, and for I'm assuming a lot of folks out in the audience, camera gear is a pretty fun and inspiring part of the whole photographic journey.

you might need to change your gear. Maybe your style is shifting or you're prepping for a trip and need something new and specialized. Whatever the reason, the cycle of buying and selling and upgrading gear is is definitely something we all go through. And this is where MPB really shines. it's one of the most straightforward and trustworthy ways I've personally found to buy, sell, or trade camera gear.

without any of the friction from like online marketplaces or online listings. Every single piece of gear is inspected, tested, and individually photographed. So you know what you buy from them is exactly what you're gonna get at your door. Plus it comes with a warranty and easy returns, which takes a lot of the risk and uncertainty off the table. And if you've got gear sitting around that you're not using, MPB makes it incredibly easy to turn that into cold hard cash.

You get a very quick quote. You ship it for free with insurance included. And once they receive and confirm everything, you get paid. There's no negotiating, there's no messaging, there's no meetups, there's no hassle. So whether you're refining your kit or just clearing up some space or making a little adventure fun for your next photo trip, MPB is a really smart way to keep your camera gear working for you.

Okay, so let's get into the show.

So I'm starting with composition, and I should say these are in no particular order, but a couple of the ways I love to break the traditional rules of composition would be with exaggerated composition or heavy center-weighted subjects. So the rule in contrast is usually to think about your scene into thirds from left to right or top to bottom, or to achieve this balance in your photo.

But ultimately breaking those rules can be just as aesthetic. And so one of the first ways I like to do so is by exaggerating my composition. And I do this with big landscapes, but pretty much any time that I'm thinking, wow, it would look really good if most of my scene was one thing and there was a small sliver of this other thing somewhere in the scene. I'm talking about maybe a small sliver, like like one tenth or less of your frame of the sky at the top of your scene. One tenth or less of

Of the meadow at the bottom of your scene, so it's just the mountain and sky, or one tenth of the bottom of the scene of the ocean or the shoreline. Thinking about ways you can create that grandeur, thinking about ways you can create that expanse in your landscape by exaggerating composition is really, really key. And I do this with wildlife as well. I'm thinking of a photo I took years back where there was this massive bull elk in a beautiful meadow just outside of Jackson Hall, Wyoming. And the elk is ⁓

You know, I could have zoomed in on it, right? But I was shooting with a wide angle, or at least I think I was with my 70 to 200. And I put this elk as a very, very small piece in the the absolute postage stamp corner of my scene. Because the rest of the scene was this sweeping meadow of kind of golden grasses and mottled snow leading into the the mountains, you know, part of the Tetons with a big dramatic, kind of cloudy, wispy, sky.

And that was just very, very exaggerated. I did not put that wildlife at one of the crosshairs or intersecting points of the rule of thirds. I didn't even put it in one third of the scene. It was way down in the bottom because I wanted to show this big animal is really dwarfed by this really big landscape. So I love exaggerated composition. I think about it probably alongside the rule of thirds when I'm getting into any sort of photographic scene in front of me.

The other time I like to break the rules with composition is that center weighted or that that center-featured subject. the subject doesn't have to be a person or or an animal, it doesn't have to be wildlife. It could be a flower, it could be a tree. But the rule generally says we we shouldn't, for rules of aesthetics and mathematics and the way the human brain and eye work, we don't necessarily like to see things just in the dead middle of the frame, but it works sometimes. It can work for you. Putting something in the dead middle of the frame is not

an unequivocally wrong thing to do. I will tell you the times where I think it it tends to naturally work best is when you have some sort of uniformity on the left and the right of the photo. So like let's just imagine ⁓ a squirrel sitting in a meadow of green grasses and yellow wildflowers. When that meadow is completely uniform and that squirrel is in the dead middle, it can actually be a really interesting shot because of the patterns of nature that are sort of surrounding this animal. So I think symmetry

⁓ and sort of that reflectivity between the left and the right being almost equal really lends itself very well for center-weighted shots or having your subject in the dead middle of your frame. But there are a lot of other times as well. you might be doing top-down photography. I like doing this in markets, I like doing this ⁓ you know, when I'm ⁓ eating interesting food, all sorts of stuff. It's just a good top-down shot. But again, it's because there's that shape of the plate, it's the shape of the barrel of spices, it's the shape of the vegetable basket.

And it kind of creates this uniformity where the eye does naturally think to go towards the middle because there isn't a lot of difference in the left or right or even difference in the top to bottom. So again, there's always a time and a place for putting your subject in the dead middle. But oftentimes when we find symmetry in the overall frame, meaning the left and the right and or the top and the bottom are relatively similar to one another, it really kind of screams to me, ⁓ put the thing in the middle because this might be a really intriguing shot.

next up is exposure. The breaking of the rule here is that the scene does not need to be perfectly exposed across all pixels. You don't need a quote unquote perfect exposure. Today, cameras are very, very good at creating ⁓ high levels of dynamic range and achieving perfect exposure in your scene if you're shooting on P for program or A for aperture or any of the

settings other than full full manual, it's going to meter your scene to have 18% gray across all pixels, meaning it's going to do the calculation, the mathematics, and these little little computers inside the camera. And it's going to figure out how do I expose the scene to make sure the the summation or the average of all pixels in the scene averages to 18% pure gray. So that's what you're going to get out of the camera if you're setting your camera on even

shooting on any of those other modes. Full manual is a different thing. But even myself, I do not shoot on full full manual. I shoot on manual plus auto ISO. That means my camera's metering for me. ⁓ but I am often breaking the rules here and I do not keep my camera meter set on zero. I I don't want quote unquote perfect exposure. Part of this is because, let's be honest, in many of my episodes I've talked about, the camera just doesn't get it right all the time. Like what the camera thinks is perfect isn't necessarily what's actually perfect because

It's just a computer. It's just a it's just a calculation machine. It's not the artist. It's not the vision. It doesn't know that you're in the deserts of Namibia one moment and then photographing polar bears another moment and then photographing gorillas in Rwanda another moment. obviously these things aren't happening all moment to moment. We're talking about trip to trip,

But nevertheless, you may be faced with these things in a given calendar year or in your overall travel career. and the camera doesn't know that you're changing landscapes dramatically. It's again just going for mathematics, 18% gray. So what am I really talking about? How do I do this? What is my imperfect exposure? Well, I love extreme lighting and I love very high key photos and very low key photos.

And when I say high and low key, that just means very, very bright or very, very dark. So oftentimes when I see a scene that has mostly bright lighting all around it and then a dark shadowy subject in the middle, I might expose for that middle subject, therefore blowing out all the highlights and making an extremely bright photo. This would be something like plus three stops on my exposure meter, or even more, maybe. So I'm I'm oftentimes toying with going to the left and the right of that.

even exposure to get really interesting shots. Same thing on the dark end of the spectrum. If I see a brightly lit patch of the forest where the sun is just screaming through the tops of the trees, I'm thinking like a tropical jungle where you know the trees are so tall that it filters light into these real specific kind of funnels and halos, you can expose for that beam of light and it's gonna make the rest of the forest really, really dark, like almost pitch black. Like you're gonna

lose the data. You're gonna lose the the color and texture and even not know what's in the shadows because it's so dark. But it's gonna be really intriguing, really interesting because that beam of light is going to be perfectly exposed when you underexpose your whole scene and tell the camera, hey, we're not going for 18% gray across the pixels. We're going for something much, much darker. So I go to minus three stops or minus two stops, but I go way on the negative end and way on the positive end across my trips, across my years, across all of my work.

The next one has to do with sharpness. so I think one of the things that we really could probably mostly agree on is that most really good photos are very sharp. ⁓ actually not always the case. Like motion blur and a little bit of blur in the scene, even if it's unintentional, can be a beautiful thing. So this ⁓ anti-rule, this breaking the rule is challenging the notion that good photos have to be tack sharp.

⁓ that is a true thing that some good photos, many good photos, are tack sharp, and I look for tack sharpness in my wildlife photography, and it's something that I definitely pay attention to, but that's not to say that some blur ruins a photo each and every time. There are absolutely cases when you want to think about motion blur. So what are those cases? Well, generally I'm thinking of motion blur.

when there is motion in the scene. If we're talking about moving cars or moving people, a busy market, ⁓ you know, not that you're photographing in an airport necessarily, but the chaos going around the check-in counters, or maybe at a traditional dance in a in a village, like a cultural dance, and people are twirling around and and just having all sorts of fun and it just kind of seems like busy chaos.

Why not have a little bit of motion blur? Why do you need to stop the motion and freeze the motion each and every time? Well, simply put, you don't. So this one is really challenging the notion that everything has to be tack sharp and frozen in time each and every time, because that's just simply not the case.

I love motion blur.

So if we think of practical examples or some takeaways that you can practice with, I really think that slow shutters or motion blur starts in and around like the 1/60th of a second kind of realm. This all has a lot to do with how fast the motion is, even how big your lens is, like what the focal length of your lens is,

So this is not a tried and true every situation bit of advice, but generally when you're looking at something anywhere between 1/60th and slower, you're probably gonna get some motion blur in your scene So the real trick here is know that you can absolutely break the rule of Tac Sharp Focus, but you have to start looking for it and start thinking about it. When are you in front of a lot of motion that's a little bit predictable? Motion that is prolonged. You know, you it's it's hard to get motion blur when you just see one swat of a grizzly bear arm and then they don't move anywhere.

anymore after that, like that you you can't capture that. But if you're seeing routine, predictable, consistent motion, start to think about breaking that rule of sharpness and go for the opposite of sharpness. Inject that blur. And it can be anywhere along the spectrum. It doesn't have to be completely blurred like how a carousel would be if you had a two-second exposure, you know, like a at a carnival like a carousel, you know, moving around a lot.

You can almost visualize this scene of the blurred lights and whatnot. It doesn't have to be that extreme. It can be very little bits of motion blur, but motion blur can be a really beautiful thing. And I think it's it's definitely something that gets you next level in your photography if you do it right. So I really advise that you not only embrace this.

rule breaking concept, but also start to look for times when you can use motion blur because it's a beautiful way to capture next level photos.

Okay, this one might be a little controversial. When not to focus on the eyes. So you know, one of my real tried and true rules that I I truly almost never break is that in general you want to focus on the eyes.

So is it okay to not focus on the eyes and when might you want to do so? Well, in general, I think this is this is a harder rule to break, but when I'm filling the frame with wildlife, especially of their face, like I'm thinking of a grizzly bear or a polar bear, something big where with the normal telephoto lenses we all carry, you can get just the head, just the face in the frame, like like

cheeks on left and right side and forehead and chin on top to bottom, like that close. And you might do something compelling and interesting where it's got a big old nose like bears do that protrudes out and you focus on the nose. you get the nose and texture and detail and you shoot at a very shallow depth of field and those eyes are just

lurking in the background, kind of deliberately blurred in almost sort of an ominous kind of way, if it's looking back at you. I think that could be a really cool example. or another time might be when the environment in the foreground

Is just simply more interesting. I'm thinking of a photo of a lion I took not too many years ago where this lioness is prowling through the grasses, stalking something, and we happen to be at a relatively good distance where I could fill the frame with the body. Not filling the frame with the face, but I could get pretty close to it. So it's kind of like portraiture, but then I'm focusing on the grasses in front of me and the lion is blurred behind it. So this is a case where the whole animal's blurred, including the eyes, but it is a really cool photo that I like because the grasses are.

and tack sharp focus. And again, it kind of

creates this tension. ⁓ it's it's getting the viewer to say, Whoa, what is behind there? my gosh, it's a lion. Why is it blurred? because it's it's trying to be stealthy, it's trying to stalk through the grass. Look at how dense the grass is. I could have missed it. So it's really a bit of storytelling and all that, but those are times when you can get away with not focusing the eyes, even though it is a dominant wildlife photo. So again, if you fill the frame and you focus on another feature of its face that happens to be quite interesting, and then also when there

as an animal and there's some sort of cool foreground that actually gets the focus instead of the animal itself.

Okay, the next way we're gonna break the rules is let the horizon be wrong. You know, we're often pretty focused on getting that level horizon, and I've just been spending hours and days editing photos from a a big photo trip in Namibia recently, and I can't tell you how many times I'm having to straighten the horizon because for whatever reason in the moment

I just didn't get quite level. ⁓ but there are many times where you want to deliberately take the shot and have an unlevel horizon. ⁓ I'm thinking when there are angles in nature, when there are things like coastlines, when there are trees, when you have interesting storm scenes with big billowy clouds, abstract things like icebergs and dunes, forest canopies shot upward, you don't always have to level the horizon. Like I want to I want to underline that point

So the way we break the rule here is you don't always have to obsess with getting the horizon completely level. in fact, in videography, this is often termed the Dutch angle. You can angle your camera, gosh, 45 degrees, and really create an interesting scene by using the angles found in nature to kind of even give you a leading line into your subject, down the coastline, along the side of a volcano.

So again, this this isn't really you standing in front of the classic sunset beach scene and saying, I'm gonna have it 10 degrees off and it's gonna be a great photo.

That's not what we're really talking about. We're talking about when you're shooting down a coastline where the the angle of the beach is already at a different angle than the horizon. And maybe minimizing the horizon in your shot and maximizing the effect of these lines going through nature. Again, we're thinking about things like beach scenes and crashing waves. It might be running animals where you align the the path of the animal at the expense of a flat horizon. It could be flying birds, all sorts of different things. There are a lot of

times when you do need to have a level horizon, but it's not all the time. And being wrong with horizon can provide some really, really great results If you do it with some intention.

I want to underline that point. You do need to be creative. You do need to have a justification. Like if someone were to ask you, huh, why is the horizon not level? Your answer can't be, well, I just didn't think much about it. I I I just didn't hold a camera still enough. No, the reason is, hey, I actually wanted to angle it because if you see the way that the waves are coming in, they're also at an angle. So I kind of wanted to have the contours of the beach, juxtaposed with the angle of the waves, juxtaposed with this cloud coming down in the sky on the horizon. So there's there's definitely

Definitely some creativity involved, but again, the the main point here is that you should be able to justify it and you need to shoot with intention when breaking the rule of the horizon.

Okay, so the next one is maximalism. So I often say, and this is one of the rules, is if something doesn't add to the photo, it subtracts. And again, I think it's a pretty good way to approach a scene. It's a shortcut to get you to a better photo quicker and with a little bit less guesswork. However,

there are definitely times when you can continue to add and add and add to the scene. Can you move left or right and include this additional tree or this additional patch of grasses? I'm thinking of busy markets in other countries where you have baskets hanging down and you have, you know, fish stalls and you have people, paying over here and trading things here and all sorts of stuff going on. And we often think, well, I kind of need to simplify this scene because there's so much going on here. I'm gonna zoom in or I'm gonna use a telephoto and I'm gonna

to just subtract as much as I can from the scene. Well, the way to break this rule is put on that wide angle or zoom out and get as much of the maximalism chaos as you possibly can. You know, shoot through the clutter.

You might want to use a shallow depth of field to simplify it a little bit, but there are definitely times when you can use that busyness as multiple layers in your scene. They might become your foreground, mid-ground, background, or foreground, foremid, middle mid, mid-back, and then background. You can have multiple layers into your scene. And sometimes this can really look quite compelling. ⁓ it can also be a great storytelling opportunity.

So while I don't do it as my default, I do like to simplify my scenes, especially because I am a travel photographer and I'm often shooting for things like magazines and websites and whatnot, but sometimes maximalism in the scene, if done right, and if you have the right scene where those layers of complexity, layers of chaos actually create an overall story and vibe that can be really quite beautiful.

the next one is a little bit of environmental. So we often think that we want to shoot on those beautiful weather days. We want the bluebird skies, we want the nice orange sun, but this rule is breaking the idea or breaking the concept in our minds that we need to be capturing beautiful things in beautiful weather. Sometimes shooting in bad weather can be as good, if not sometimes significantly better.

so embracing Mother Nature and whatever she is throwing your way on a given day can be a really great thing. And remember, cloudy weather is actually the best weather for portraiture of like any kind. This could be wildlife portraiture, people portraiture, having that soft, even lighting can do really, really great things for your photos.

But also photographing in bad weather can help set you apart as a photographer. You know, I think one of the big things we try to do in the world of photography, especially nature photography, is we try to show people something that they may not otherwise have been able to see. and so when you're photographing on really tumultuous weathery days, safely, of course, don't be on the edge of a canyon and

have risk of being struck by lightning or anything, but if you can shoot in the rain safely there, of course as well, don't ruin your gear. But if you can shoot in these adverse weather conditions, you're really giving people a glimpse into another part of the planet, another part of the landscape that they may have been to multiple times. They may have hiked that trail a hundred times in great weather,

But they've never hiked it in a rainstorm. They've never hiked it in full-on snow or hail even. So shooting in bad weather is it's kind of a I'm using some artistic license here on breaking the rules with this topic, but it is a good thing to think about that what we often have in our minds is photographing on great weather days, photographing with a lot of saturation of colors because of that beautiful sunlight. Well, think of the opposite. Break the rules of good weather and shoot in adverse conditions.

All right, quick pause here because I wanna share something that has generally changed how I approach the business side of my photography, and that's my website through art storefronts.

Like a lot of photographers, I would frankly rather be out in the field creating than sitting behind a laptop trying to figure out how to market and promote and sell my work. That set of things can feel pretty overwhelming pretty quickly. And if you're not consistent in how you talk about your work, you're starting off on the back foot. What I've found with art storefronts is it's not just a beautiful website. It is that they design some really exquisite looking photo websites, but it's a full system built specifically for photographers who actually want to generate income.

from their work. They are essentially a one-stop shop from again beautiful website design to things like built-in promo

And sales tools. They also have marketing features and blog writing tools that help you stay consistent without a whole lot of added work. And importantly, there's a real human support element behind it all. Like there are people that will answer your questions. You can actually have them upload things and keyword and rename things for you. It's not just software, it's like real people behind everything. And here's something really great for listeners of the wild.

Photographer. If you mention this podcast, Art Storefronts will set you up and optimize your website for you completely free. That's like an eighteen hundred dollar value. So head on over to artstorefronts.com, check it out, and make sure you mention the wild photographer to get that full setup included.

I also want to thank Bay Photo. There is something very powerful about seeing your work off of a screen and out in the real world, like something tangible, something printed. Whether you've been shooting for years or you're just getting started in your journey of photography, printing your photos has this way of really pushing your creativity forward. And honestly, it never stops being inspiring to me that moment that I unpackage a photo that I just printed from Bay Photo. They've been doing this for over 50 years, which is kind of incredible when you think about it, considering how much photography.

Photography has changed as an industry and as a business and just as a thing. they've stayed consistently excellent at what they do, producing high-quality prints that make your work shine. They make the whole process really simple. And on top of that, the options are extensive from metal prints and acrylics to canvas frame prints. You've got a lot to work with and in a whole litany of beautiful pro-level photo paper.

You add in fast turnaround times and white label drop shipping if you do wish to provide

prints directly to clients. and they even have optional color correction by real experts. it's just a really solid setup. And right now you can get 25% off any wall order display with code TWP25. So just head on over to bayphoto.com slash the wild photographer and bring your images into the real world.

Okay, now back to the show.

Here we're breaking the rule or the traditional concept that you should have a shallow depth of field for wildlife and a deep depth of field for landscapes. Like most of the time when I'm recommending aperture settings and F stops for people, this might be in this podcast or my YouTube channel or even in the field when I'm guiding photo trips, I'm usually going for a small F number for wildlife to give that great background separation and blur. And for landscapes, I'm going for a big F number to get everything in focus.

Instead, break those rules, break those confines, and do the opposite. For wildlife, go for wildlife and landscape shots. Get everything in focus. Get the background, the foreground, and the animal, get everything in tack sharp focus to make it like a wildlife in landscape type photo.

And for landscapes, go for a shallow depth of field. You don't always have to get everything in focus. Especially if there are really interesting, compelling foreground elements like flowers or rocks or trees or

bushes, anything. You can minimize that distraction of the background, even if it is a big lovely mountain scene or a huge river going behind you. Minimize that distraction. Create some artistic vibe, show the expanse, and just again, break the traditional rules and concept that you should have a deep depth of field for landscapes and shallow for wildlife. Doing the opposite can be equally beautiful.

Okay, here's a great one.

Breaking the rules about time of day. So in a recent episode, I talked a lot about time of day, and that you know, my favorite time to photograph just about anything is that golden hour. It's usually like roughly the hour or two after the sun rises and the hour or two just before the sun sets. It's a beautiful, soft, low-angled, very golden, very yellowy, orangey light. And it's it's exquisite. You know, I can't say enough good things about it. But that being the rule, let's break it and talk about other times of day. And frankly, it's midday.

Would be the rule breaking scenario here. We typically don't like that because it's big top-down light, it's big harsh shadows and harsh highlights. But think about breaking the rule and going out midday for some high contrast photography. This gets back to that high and low key thing I was talking about. What a great time to experiment with really bright photos or really dark photos at that midday time. Because let's face it, the light is intense. It's actually difficult to work with.

Do you get to have it all? Do you have your cake and eat it too in midday? No, absolutely not. But constraint is the mother of creativity here. So it's great for high and low key photos. It's also great for black and white.

Black and white photography works really, really well for midday when you do have these really dark shadows and really bright highlights because it just simplifies the scene. And don't take my word for it, go experiment yourself. you don't have to set your camera to black and white. In fact, I rarely, if ever, do. I do this all on post-processing. If you're using Lightroom or Camera Raw, there's just a one button click to convert your whole photo to black and white.

And you'll find that those midday photos go from something where you're not really satisfied with them, like probably not something you really want. And all of a sudden in black and white, you're like, my gosh, this is like a work of art. So definitely think about time of day as a way to break the rules. Go out in that midday, think differently, shoot differently, process differently. It's a great time to break the rules.

Another rule I've talked about in past is this idea that many great photos have this foreground, midground, background element, this kind of layering effect. So breaking the rule here, don't do that. Go for minimalism. Just photograph one thing. in fact, friend and previous podcast guest, Jason Edwards, who is a very award-winning Nat Geophotographer, his one rule in his own photography is that he can only have one thing in the shot.

There is only one thing. Now, that doesn't mean that every single photo is extreme minimalism for him. It's not just photographing one penguin on a huge ice sheet and that's it, and then he doesn't do anything the rest of the trip. No, it's it's the fact that you should really simplify your scene, even if you have a beautiful foreground, midground, and background, and concentrate on that one thing and think about how do you simplify to create a very minimalistic vibe. And I realize I was just talking about maximalism several topics ago, but that's the beauty of photography is you really do get to.

Have it all. There isn't only one right way to do things. And I think this topic of breaking the rules really underlines that. So instead of having that classic layering effect of foreground, mid ground, background, embrace minimalism. Think about one thing the rest of the scene hinges on

And make your photograph that way. Think about including less.

Okay, I really like this next rule and this is photographing the aftermath. don't only photograph the peak action. Shoot what happens before and after. Maybe it might be tracks after the animal has gone and left. It might be feathers after an animal hunt.

It could be muddy footprints after a river crossing. It could be trampled grass from a herd that's just moved through, or or broken ice after a seal has surfaced, ripples after a diving bird disappears. You know, the list is the list is pretty long. So we often think in the world of wildlife photography, especially, if we can capture that moment of the diving bird, of the the wildebeest crossing the river, that's great. But thinking about photographing a little too late can actually be a great way to concentrate on your photography.

So oftentimes with nature and especially wildlife photography, we're we're trying to capture that moment, that pinnacle, really the climax. I guess this is sort of the anti-climax photo moment. That's how we're breaking the rules here. Is think about, well, there there actually is a lot more to the story. There's the lead up, which is sometimes hard to predict, but the aftermath can be really quite fascinating. And again, ripples in the water, fur that's been shed after male bear sparring. Think about how you can tell the whole story and

photograph the scene after the action has actually happened.

I find that these sort of images create story ⁓ ironically through absence. Like absence of the thing that you're expecting to see actually creates a little bit of tension and intrigue in your photo. So it's a really good strategy for breaking the rules.

Okay, the next one, star trails. So you've heard me talk in astrophotography recently about how you want to limit your shutter speed so that you don't actually get the Earth's rotation to blur the stars. And so the the rule here is photographing it's called the 500 rule. You take 500 and divide that by your focal length. and that's kind of the maximum number of seconds you can shoot before you start to get little star trails, and the the stars actually appear blurred. But flip.

This on its head, break those rules hardcore, and go for star trails. And these are really really fun. This is you've probably seen photos of this. This is where you get the big swirlies in the sky, like the whole sky looks like a spirograph, it looks like a big circle of light. And this is really, really fun. ⁓ I gotta say, I haven't done a ton of them in my career because they take so long and I'm so impatient when it comes to night photography. But the way you can do it is you have to set your camera on bulb mode, B-U-L-B.

And there's a little bit of guesswork involved because you have to set your camera up for probably like an hour at least. ⁓ and you're not gonna see the final photo until you're done. So if if you want to take two or three photos a night, that's like two or three hours at least, with no review in the middle of each shot. So it's it's again kind of tedious, but the the

Ending result can be spectacular. So Star Trails, again, if you set your camera on bulb mode, I would recommend putting your camera at, you know, pretty moderate aperture, like f5.6. You don't have to get too fancy there. And then usually ISO 100. That the idea is that you're actually getting so much light because these these.

stars you're traveling around that you don't have to have that traditional really really shallow depth of field or fast lens. So again, F2.8, F4, any of those things are gonna work. I think an ISO of 100 to 400 is a-okay. but this is the challenge is that you do need to experiment based on the ambient lighting conditions. Like if you have any light coming from the moon or from a campsite, that's gonna get really amplified because you're literally setting your camera on a bulb or fully open mode and it doesn't

Close that shutter until you manually turn your camera off or otherwise tell it to close the shutter. So what bulb mode does is it opens your shutter and then you manually have to come back and tell it when to close. And that's when you have to set your watch or set an alarm and say, okay, in one hour, I'm gonna go turn my camera off. It's gonna close the shutter, and I will have just captured one hour of light in my scene. So you have to do some thinking, you have to do some pre-planning. You definitely want to get away from any sort of ambient light sources. You shine one flashlight in that scene.

and you might you might really affect the shot. I've taken shots like this around campfires and campsites and it it really is incredible how just a small glow from afar really comes through in the photo because you have so much time that your shutters open.

So again, you know, rules are in place for a reason. They are a shortcut to getting us great photos, but they're not the only way to great photos. And in fact, in this world of more and more photos being put in front of our faces and more and more people following the rules of photography, it's a great opportunity to make yourself different, make your scenes different, make your photography style different by breaking the rules time to time. I'm not saying go out from this podcast and do nothing but break the rules. There are times and places for that, but a simple exercise.

Would be to kind of plan on breaking one rule per outing. So, like on your next shoot, pick one rule to intentionally break. Not all 12 of them all at once, just one. So

for example, maybe today I'm going to center every subject that I see. And will all the photos be perfect? No, absolutely not, but it's going to really help you develop the eye and the sense of awareness of which photos really lend themselves to these breaking the rule type shots. maybe you're gonna go out and shoot busy scenes and use the clutter. Maybe you're gonna go out and shoot no faster than one twentieth of a second or one fortieth of a second and just see what motion blur does for your photography when you come back and review. maybe I will do

nothing but compose my scenes to have massive negative space that minimalism.

So remember that constraint forces creativity. So not only is it good to think about this in practice in you know this next time that you go out on a little photo walk or practice around your home or your hometown, but it's also a good thing to take with you out in the field on longer photo trips or photo weekends or or larger photo assignments if that's your thing. Constraint is the mother of creativity. So think about it, think about how you can break the rules and go out there and give it a shot.

Before I leave, I want to turn you on to my YouTube channel if you haven't already checked it out. I am really doubling down on my photo editing tutorials, and I'm editing photos in real time. I'm showing you my process of using masks and using brush tools, exactly where you're gonna see them in camera raw and lightroom.

And within a couple minutes, you're gonna learn how I take a photo from start to finish. Because really, I only spend a few minutes on each photo that I take. everyone's a little bit of a different topic. it might be how to make boring skies pop in big landscapes, it might be how to use mask tools for dark rainforests. and I'm pumping these things out quite often. So if you do head over to my YouTube channel, give me a comment, let me know that you came over from the podcast.

I would love to hear from you. If you have questions about techniques, if you have questions about the episodes, if you have ideas for future episodes, the best way is to

Leave me a comment on any of my videos and I will see them and I will be happy to respond. I really look forward to being in touch with you. Also, if you have been enjoying this podcast, consider sharing it with a friend. one of my big goals is to get more photographic passions out there. So if you have a photographer friend that hasn't yet heard of this podcast and you think might benefit and enjoy, please do forward. And once again, thanks so much for joining and talk to you next time.


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Court Whelan

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