There is a visual trick that your eyes can play on you, in which you look at a large distant object looming over a scene and make it look even larger and closer than it is. It is something I need to watch out for when shooting landscapes, because the resulting photo does not look nearly as interesting as the eyes made it appear.
That was the case here, and I must admit I restarted to some trickery to present this scene as I saw it. This is Dead Horse Point in the Utah state park of the same name, with an artificially enlarged moon. I usually eschew this sort of manipulation, and am generally opposed to it, but I could not resist doing so here. I have been playing with this image on and off for over a year, trying to get something that was as interesting as what I saw, but it never worked. The funny thing is, now that I’ve done it I’m happier with the original. Maybe I’ll show it later this week.
LensScaper
6 Sep 2014To my mind this is a dramatic successful landscape, Mark. Simple as that. But then I have a purely objective view and no prior knowledge of the place. I also wouldn’t have known the moon was ‘enlarged’.
I recently visited a photographic exhibiton in London, where most of the images were broadly in the ‘minimalist’ genre of landscape – and very successful they were too. This too has a minimalist feel to it and that is what I think makes it work. There is a beauty to it – it’s wild, it’s desolate, but it is also strangely intimate. And the light fires it up.
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