Last week I shared a picture from Agate Fossil Beds National Monument that wasn’t so much about long-deceased animals as it was about my attempt to capture the vast landscape with my rather diminutive little Fuji X100F–not exactly an easy task for that camera, or any camera, really. It’s a difficult thing to impart a sense of what it feels like to bear witness to miles and miles of sweeping vistas in a single still image, but one technique that often helps is to give viewers something familiar to use as a reference point. Another option is to compose your shot with something in the foreground, like the little yellow flower from last week’s shot. The issue I had with that one, though, was that there were hundreds or even thousands of other flowers in the frame as well, which muddied the foreground a bit and made it a little difficult to suss out the subject. Not so with this picture.
I took this a few days after last week’s photo when we had gone on from the grassy prairie and rolling hills of western Nebraska to the rocky, worn, and weathered terrain of Badlands National Park. (There’s a reason it was used as a filming location for alien planets in Starship Troopers.) I had never been to this part of the country before and, of course, I took a lot of photos while we drove, hiked, and climbed our way across the landscape over the course of a couple days. But one thing became clear pretty quickly: very few of my photos really imparted a sense of just how huge, dry, and desolate these locations really were. I think part of it had to do with the colors: when everything is a similar shade of dull brown, contours blend together and distinguishing characteristics that separate one ridge from another tend to disappear when captured in a picture.
Alas, what’s a photographer to do? While I’m not sure I know the answer, I did try two things here, and I’m curious whether you think it worked or not. The first is to take a cue from the Agate Fossil Beds photo and put something familiar in the foreground. With no flowers to be found, I instead focused on this stalk of grass that was shooting skyward from the dry, dusty ground.
The other way in which this photo attempts to capture perspective is through a more intentional use of light and shadow. The subject in the foreground is bright, almost glowing, against the darker rocky terrain behind it which not only draws the viewer’s eye to a specific point of the photo but also invites them to consider the distance between that point and the background far away. To create this effect I did not alter anything in the scene, but rather repositioned myself so as to put the sun off to the right side of the frame and thus lighting my subject (the grass) from the side while also capturing the undulations behind it in shadow.
What I like most about this shot is the memories it brings back, of a special trip that my family and I were able to take together. Sure it’s a fun scene to look at as-is, but for me, the personal stories this tells are memories that I will not soon forget. And hopefully not ever.
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