THE WOMAN WITH THE WALKING STICK

By MICHAEL PERKINS

IF “LIFE” IS DEFINED AS THE STUFF THAT HAPPENS while you’re making plans, Photography can be said to be comprised of the pictures that emerge while you’re planning other pictures. We have all begun setting up what we hope will be the ideal frame when something from just offstage screams, “hey, look over here.” Success and failure, then, are often measured by how insistent them strange little voices can be.

In the astringent desert vistas of Arizona’s Tonto National Forest, merely the shock of color generated by a late-winter “superbloom” of Mexican poppies would normally be all the visual fuel needed for a luscious landscape. And, just ahead of this shot, things certainly started out that way.

And then I saw Her.

Just a solo woman with a walking stick. Just one small figure with a determined stride, separating from the roadside throngs of thrilled snappers wading through the golden waves of flowers and striking out on her own to head….where? Her actual destination was unimportant; more importantly, her very position in my viewfinder had given an “okay” scene a stronger central axis.

Walking along a wire fence, she reinforced its receding line, pulling the viewer’s eye into the picture and toward her. Her separation from the parallel highway and the distant mountains established scale. And finally, showing a scattered field of poppies provided more contrast and texture than the unbroken blankets of them available just across the road.

Start with one plan, shift gently to a slightly different one. Think them both through and make a deliberate choice. In an art that strives to be less about taking pictures and more about making them, challenging your first instincts is a habit worth cultivating.