Scale

One of the things I like trying to do at the sandplant is make pictures which are ambiguous. Either in the the way space is dealt with, or the scale of things. I like how the limited environment can be made to look vast, and how small things can be made to look large. You can use a long focal length lens to compress distance and flatten the picture plane or to distort perspective by opening up the space with a wide angle lens. Alternatively you can alter your viewpoint. Eliminating the natural horizon takes away one depth clue and can alter perceived scale too by removing an implied vanishing point.

I don't know what the plant is in the following two pictures, I just liked it's treelike form, and wanted to make it's size difficult to determine. I was also struck by the way it's shape echoed that of the mound behind it. Separating the plant from the background was tricky. The lighting helped, as did opening up the aperture to reduce the background clutter by blurring it. The moderate telephoto lens aided the reduction of depth of field and the sense of scale.

Still using a low viewpoint, but a wider angled lens, I changed position to make a different composition while still trying to achieve the disparity of scale by using the plant to frame the indistinct background structure.

Quite how well these pictures succeed, I'm not sure. Maybe the connections I'm making from the picture with run of the mill landscape pictures are all in my mind.

These, and more of the usual stuff, from today here. Time to draw a line under this project and start editing the mass of pictures down to a tight selection.

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