Image of the Week: Boulders II, Canyonlands National Park, Utah

It's all about perspective.

You're out hiking, you come around a bend, and all of sudden you see a marvelous confluence of light, texture, and form before you. You quickly whip out your digital camera, slap it on a tripod, and hastily crank out several frames of the scene, knowing that the light can't possibly last much longer. Satisfied with your capture, you stow your gear and continue down the trail, ready for the next found image.

Or do you?

The paragraph above closely describes what I did while hiking in Canyonlands National Park. I rounded a bend in the trail and saw the scene pretty much as it appears in the small image on the left. I was struck by the dramatic side lighting, long shadows, and complex textures of the boulders. I attached my digital camera to a tripod, composed the image, and fired off a few frames.

But I didn't stop there.

With the camera off the tripod, I walked around the boulders trying to find a different angle...something more intimate, more graphic. At last, I settled upon the larger composition pictured at right. Resetting my tripod for the new angle, I shot a few frames with the digital camera. Because of the large depth of field needed to capture the front and rear boulders in sharp focus, I set up my view camera, applied a small amount of front tilt to produce the desired depth-of-field, and exposed a few sheets of film.

Walk around with your camera off the tripod and experiment with different angles and compositions. All too often, I see photographers compose an image only after they've attached the camera to a tripod, effectively limiting themselves to a single perspective with pan, tilt, and zoom as their only compositional tools. You can produce some fine images this way, but you're potentially missing out on other, perhaps stronger, compositions.

Think three-dimensionally, and don't be afraid to get on your knees.

Technical Data

I shot Boulders II, Canyonlands National Park, Utah with a Tachihara 4x5 field camera and a Fujinon•W 150mm ƒ/6.3 lens on Kodak T-MAX 100. The exposure, though not recorded, was approximately 1/15 sec at ƒ/16.

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