A typical nature scene, especially woodlands and meadows include a lot of visual clutter and overlap when seen from the typical human angle of view.  When we press the camera’s shutter button from that perspective, everything is permanently recorded into our digital image.  We are frequently disappointed when the photo “doesn’t look like what we saw”.  Plenty of studies have been done on comparing human perception to a camera’s imaging system.  Moral of the story is that we focus differently and our optical systems have different dynamic ranges than cameras currently in existence.

How to compensate for the ever all-seeing camera lens?  “Organize the chaos.”  A well known phrase to experienced photographers.  How to organize?  One of the many techniques is to seek symmetry in nature photography.  Absolute symmetry is rarely going to present itself, but we will still seek it…

In my photo below I’ve aligned my angle of view to have two nearly parallel trees create a natural rectangle (or is that a rhombus?) around the sun.

New Jersey nature photo of an overcast sky as framed by two large trees and their gnarled branches. Handheld capture from the #Tamron 16-300mm VC PZD lens and #Canon EOS T5 #DSLR