It had been a while since I visited Campbell’s Covered Bridge. By this point, I had taken dozens, perhaps hundreds, photos of the bridge and the surrounding area. I was beginning to think that all compositional possibilities had been exhausted.
There is a hill with the large grassy open area, surrounded by forest, directly in front of the bridge. On this day and on many other days I walked up that hill, through the grass, turning around occasionally, searching for an interesting composition of the bridge from the higher ground of the hillside.
The old legs were getting tired, walking up and down and across that hill. I was about ready to call it a day. Distracting elements kept showing up in my photos. Some could be edited out and some could not. At the bottom of the hill I stopped for a moment to think. I decided to give it one more try at a spot I thought I might have missed. I walked up the hill for 20 or 30 feet, turned around, and the view I saw seemed just about perfect, except for some of those distracting elements. Standing there, I took several shots, reviewed them on the screen on the back of my camera.
I was disappointed.
This day was, or at least should have been, a perfect opportunity to get a good photo of the bridge. A clean white light from the sun, high in the blue sky, the yellows and greens of spring, and the magnificent red of the bridge itself seem to beg to be photographed. But I could not get happy about the results I saw on the back of my camera.
Frustrated, doing something I would not typically do, and with a bench only a few feet away, I sat down in the grass and began looking in earnest through the photographs I had just taken, hoping, trying to determine if one would be salvageable through editing.
Nope! Not even one. I felt defeated.
Then I looked up.
From where I sat, the bright grass and the rolling shape of the bottom of the hill magically removed most of the distracting features and perfectly completed the framing of my subject. I lifted my camera and looked through the viewfinder. I was pleased, pleasantly surprised.
Right when I thought it wasn’t going to happen, the solution came to me, and I wasn’t even thinking about solutions right then. I was just sitting there, disheartened by the photos I had already taken.
The lesson I gleaned from that is simple: when you have a problem that has no obvious solution, give your powerful subconscious mind a chance to work on it in the background; a solution may come forth, and it might be much simpler and better than your conscious mind could think of.