Finding a Stage (1 of 2)

How did I get this shot of the women tossing their graduation caps into the air, with Lincoln’s statue looking on from behind? The answer is to find a stage, and then wait for the action.

Finding the stage: This is a basic concept of any photography anywhere, but especially street photography in busy public spaces. I first learned the idea from Olaf Sztaba, a very talented photographer and writer born in Poland, now living in British Columbia.  The stage is the background layer of your shot. It can be anything, but typically in an outdoor space, it might be a wall with a single window or a door frame, or a stairway, or a pedestrian bridge. The stage needs to be compositionally simple, not cluttered. A bonus is a shaft of light falling from an interesting angle - something you will commonly find in streets and alleys in any city, changing minute by minute as the sun moves across the sky. 

I found this stage at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, a place I have photographed hundreds of times, and never tire of.  This is only one of many stages on all sides of The Lincoln.  Its fluted columns attract visitors from all over the world who get their pictures snapped by friends in an iconic setting. The regularity of the columns’ architecture, and the deep shadows inside the Memorial, help simplify the space and make for a visually pleasing stage.  

Lincoln’s statue is often the subject of my photos taken at this memorial. But this time, I used it not for the main focus of attention, but as an extra element of the staging. Why? Daniel French’s Lincoln is so lifelike, and so dignified, that I thought his stony marbled face would make an amusing juxtaposition with whatever living human beings happened to wander by. So I positioned myself down the steps and off to one side, so that the stage would consist of Lincoln at the rear, and the columns as the curtain at the front of Lincoln’s stage. 

Waiting for the action: So now that I’m set up, with a telephoto lens to frame the shot more intimately, all I had to do was wait.  And wait … 

I am not the world’s most patient person. 

But one of the great features of the Lincoln Memorial, which is open to visitors “24 hours” as the National Park Service says, is that some interesting subject will come along sooner than your patience wears out.  The more usual problem is that too many people come along, and your stage becomes clogged with people plopping down with their heads buried in their cellphones, or milling about aimlessly. 

On this day, an early spring morning in May, I saw these three young women climb the steps in their graduation gowns. 

Aha! The actors have arrived! 

But these actors were not taking directions from my script. They vanished into the interior of the Lincoln temple, emerged off to one side, then the other side, then the middle. Nearly all their poses were with their backs to me, as their photographer companion took a seemingly endless stream of pictures looking out from within the Lincoln’s columns toward the reflecting pool and the Washington Monument. Not a bad background, I’ve used it myself a jillion times, but it wasn’t the stage I was set up for. 

Finally, just as I was ready to go home, they faced outward toward me. I took a couple of nondescript snaps, not knowing what was going to happen. Suddenly, there it was! I saw a flutter of movement, and couldn’t exactly tell what was going on through my viewfinder. But I had the presence of mind (not guaranteed from past experience of many missed shots) to fire off a couple of shots, and then I realized I had caught their caps in mid-air.  

It was worth the wait, but it wouldn’t have worked at all if I hadn’t set up the stage first.  

Now, I guess it’s possible that a photographer more talented than me could have gotten this shot by simply wandering around and happening to raise their camera at just the right moment. 

Possible, but not likely. First, if you’re like me, and you see some action of interest happening quickly in front of you, you tend to put the subject right in the middle of your frame where your camera’s focal point is.  It’s only natural. But shoot first and compose later doesn’t work so well most of the time.  I might have gotten the ladies and their caps in the air, but catching any part of the Lincoln statue in the frame would have been pure luck.

And you know what they say about luck: It comes to the prepared.**  Which is why we photographers prepare by finding a stage.

**The exact quote comes from the Roman philosopher Seneca: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” 

Postscript: same stage, different day: (Go to part 2 of this blog post for the rest of the story.)

Footnote: See also my post Background First for an elaboration of the finding a stage technique.