That's the situation I faced today. I considered, and rejected, several ideas in my mind. I started, stuttered, sputtered, and stopped, and finally I opened the folder of collected photos and started looking, waiting for the apple to fall from the tree of inspiration and knock a thought into my head. After a little while, a theme bubbled to the surface.
Whenever I'm photographing a landscape, I try different compositions and camera settings. When I process these photos later, I notice that I have a tendency, when there is a prominent land form or geographic feature, to fully develop two takes on the subject - the far and the near. The wide open, sweeping landscape that most often emphasizes the sky, making the land form seem small in comparison to its setting, and the tight shot that makes that feature that primary emphasis. Nothing revolutionary, but I was struck by how consistently I have pairs of images like this...
Shiprock is located in the northwestern corner of New Mexico, in Navajo Nation, part of the Four Corners region of the Southwest. My wife and I were coming home from a quick weekend trip to Durango, Colorado, last July when I decided to make a slight detour so I could try to photograph this New Mexican icon. Although we could see it in the distance, and on the map, getting closer to it took some trial and error and a u-turn or two until we found the right dirt road to get us closer. We drove as far down the rutted, bumpy road as we were comfortable with and then stopped for a bit. I wasn't as close as I would liked to have been, but there was a certain drama to the skies.
When I zoomed in tighter I could see a haze in the air from the dust being kicked up by the wind, so I decided to emphasize that look when processing the photo.
Later that afternoon, closer to Santa Fe, we decided to take the Jemez Mountain Trail National Scenic Byway home instead of the Interstate. A slower roll but much nicer scenery. One of the notable features of the area is Battleship Rock, which is always impressive but something that I never stopped to photograph because the sky was always clear, and bald skies usually make for boring photographs. I wasn't expecting anything different this time, but as we rounded the corner and it came into view, I was immediately struck by how much it "popped" from the background this time, there being enough clouds in the sky to diffuse the light and soften it enough so the colors of the rock walls came out. With this wider shot the full form of the clouds really becomes a prominent feature...
This closer shot emphasizes the colors in the face of the rock...
Here's an older example from a drive through Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument about a year ago. We stopped at an overlook, and as I was taking a few photos, I liked how the black ribbon of asphalt stood out against the predominantly white rock, so I composed the shot to emphasis the land forms.
Instead of focusing on a feature of the land itself, I zoomed in on the curve of the road to make that the focal point of the photo. This is probably the least interesting or effective of the three examples presented here, but again, I think it's interesting in its own way.
The near, the far. You have to take your time and see and work the scene...
Nikon D7000, Nikkor 16-85 DX VR (first four photos), Nikkor 18-55 DX (last two)
View my online portfolio here
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