If you think this week’s photo bears some striking similarities to the one I shared last week, you would be spot-on. Or, at least, I would be inclined to agree with your assessment and also argue that such similitude is quite intentional. Most of the photos I take in familiar surrounds, such as the OSU campus or my own neighborhood, don’t exactly showcase vast landscapes and distant horizons such as the ones you see here. So, on our trip out west this summer, I wanted to challenge myself to do exactly that: find a way to, hopefully, capture some of the grandeur of the areas we were visiting with my little 35-mm equivalent Fuji X100F. That lens isn’t wide enough to truly present a sense of scale compared to, say, a 14mm lens on a proper landscape camera like the Nikon D810. Or whatever the modern mirrorless equivalent would be :)
Last week’s exercise, if you want to call it that was relatively simple, because Chimney Rock itself conveys a sense of scale naturally, all by itself. It’s such a familiar sight (well, around the Midwest anyway) that it doesn’t necessarily need any help in terms of helping viewers understand how big it is. I mean, to some extent of course, but for the most part when someone looks at a picture of Chimney Rock there’s almost an intuitive understanding of size, shape, and scale.
That’s not really the case with this week’s picture of a hill at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, a few hours down the road from the Scottsbluff area where I took last week’s picture. I stood by a walking path, camera in hand, and took a couple pictures of the scene you see here (minus the foreground) and it just didn’t really work. All you could see was just a grass-covered mound rising from a sea of green and yellow, but there wasn’t anything to convey just how vast the landscape really was. I was kind of stuck, until I thought about a way I could show perspective by using a different one of my own.
Most people understand the size of a common flower, like the one you see here in the foreground, and so I wondered what would happen if I knelt down and used one of them as the subject and composed the shot so that the fossil bed mound was in the background and also just a little blurry. My idea, and you’ll have to tell me if it worked or not, was to give viewers something familiar in the foreground in order to put the background in a broader context that helped illustrate just how big the entire scene really was. I shot at f/8, which might have actually been a bit too small, as the fossil bed mound might be just a bit too blurry, but I didn’t want to spend so much time fiddling with my camera that I ended up forgetting the whole point of being here in the first place: to spend time with my family. Because in the end, that matters way more than a couple of pictures :)
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