One of the most famous pieces of photographic advice is “turn around”. But it requires context. When you see a shot, and you set up your tripod, and you work out the exposure (yeah, this advice is old enough so that film would have been involved), and you frame it juusstt ssooo, and you press the cable release (or shutter, or remote), and you’ve got _the shot_….

Turn around.

Because whatever you’ve been shooting has had all your attention, and the whole rest of the world is still out there.

When you find yourself at a spot for an iconic shot (a “Chekhov” shot), and you take the shot….

Turn around.

Because everybody has seen that shot. Find a different one.

When you’ve stopped the car because you saw a great shot, and you’ve set it up and you’ve taken it…

Turn around.

Change your spot. Change your lens. Get down low. Lie on your stomach. Roll onto your back. Hold the camera up high. Climb up on something. Tilt the camera. Change the angle. Go longer. Go wider. Look down. Look up. Take a picture of the photographers.

Turn around.

This image was taken while shooting eagles near the Nooksack River, east of Bellingham. You will notice not a single bird in the frame. There were birds. There were even some birds in flight from time to time. But the number of different eagles in trees shots that are interesting to me is relatively small, and the number of “flyby” shots is too. (Don’t get me wrong, shooting eagles while hunting is awesome, and the timing is tough, and I can take thousands of images in a couple of hours without any trouble, but that’s not what this was).

So I “turned around”. In this case, I looked down into the creek bottom where the seagulls were. There were dead salmon (of course — that’s why there are eagles here) and the seagulls were eating off them. But there was the water.