While on family vacation at Cross Ranch this weekend, I took a little time to attend a photo seminar and to strike out along the shoreline of the Missouri River for a little while with my camera. I consider any photo trip to be a success if I come back with even one interesting photo. In this case, I spotted the fisherman above.

For me, photography is a storytelling tool. I thought it very interesting that this guy had utilized the very shallow water over a sandbar to set up shop, complete with a chair and a pair of rodholders, to enjoy a little fishing. While in the middle of the Big Muddy, and technically still in the water, he’d used the sandbar to find a nice parking spot out in the middle of it all. But there was more to the story:

I didn’t even notice this until looking at the photos back at home, but he’s watching a gaggle of geese going ashore on the far side of the river. Things like this made it interesting to pore through my collection of various shots in this setting. While this was the only interesting thing I saw on my photo walk, I was able to explore different aspects of my shots as I cropped in for more detail.

Back to the storytelling aspect of my photo walk…I wanted to show that this fisherman is actually out in the middle of the river, so I employed a trick from the photo seminar I attended at the Cross Ranch Visitors’ Center: use telephoto to compress more distance within the frame. I was already shooting this setting with my 300mm lens, so by backing off a little bit I was able to include a lot of river in the foreground and show that this scene really does take place out in the middle of the Big Muddy. I like the black and white treatment because I think it conveys the simplicity of just sitting out in the water with a tiny boat, a lawn chair, and a couple of fishing rods while the world goes by.

When I went back to camp with my camera, I thought I’d made the bare minimum of one interesting photo. What I found was, although I only shot one setting, I had captured details which only made themselves apparent later when I had the opportunity to look at them full-size. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my photo trip had been far more successful than I could have known simply looking through the viewfinder.