Where to put the house

Where to put the house? .... Jeff Johnson

Here's the dilemma. I'm in the the Grand Canyon. We have stopped to make our third night camp at a place called Cardenas Creek or Furnace Flats. (It felt more like the latter.) It's one of the few places on our eight day rafting and photography expedition that the canyon opens up and both the north and south rim viewpoints can be seen at the same time. We climbed to the top of a ridge to see the Hilltop Ruin. (I'm sorry, but it sure seemed like more than a 300 vertical feet climb.) This ruin is estimated to be 5-600 years old and is much larger than the typical ones I've seen. My thoughts are that here is a chance to show the vastness of the Grand Canyon from an unusual point of view. To make the picture more interesting, I'll include the ruin for some perspective. The Colorado River has some nice curves that look good and show how I got here as well as how the ancient inhabitants likely got their water. Also, the flats below are likely places they used to farm. Putting it all together in a pleasing image is the dilemma.

In the bottom image, my initial idea was to put the ruin in the foreground as shown in image 1. I thought the line of the top of the ruin would lead the eye into the image and catch the line of the river then draw the viewer to the Palisades in the distance. When I set it up it just didn't seem right. I think the ruin actually blocks the eye from getting into the rest of the picture.

My next thought was to back off a bit and include both the near and far walls of the ruin as in image on the right. I thought the low area in the walls would let the eye pass over and catch the line of the river. It still seemed like the ruin was blocking me from getting into the rest of the image.

I was a bit frustrated that I couldn't get the image that my mind wanted to put together. I hiked up the ridge further and noticed that the ridge line itself led the eye down to the ruin. It was now small enough in the viewfinder that it did not impede the eye's progress on to the winding line of the river and up to the Palisades.

At that point the sun was higher and the ridge line was not as well defined. Waiting for the shadows to deepen and lengthen provided the extra definition I was looking for. An added bonus was standing there with new found friends just soaking in the beauty of the sunset. (One of the guys on the trip called this process "filling the internal memory card.") The resulting image did a much better job of telling the story I had put together in my mind.

Comment

Composition is everything. No matter what happens around it, it will never be any better than the original concept. A strong composition to begin with can end in nothing less. I'm often amazed at how little thought is given to all that goes into making a landscape image. Some do it automatically. Walking to a subject, photographing it and walking away seem to happen so easily. Then there are others that spend quite a bit of time on just one frame. Some shoot many frames in a short time and some one frame over a long period of time. I think both have a great deal of thought in the process.

Going trough the mental notebook of lenses, angles, aperture and shutter speeds along with exposure are the substance of what we do. How an inch in one direction or the other changes the entire theme. How low or high adds drama and suspense. This is the heart of the matter that makes us all different.

All three of these images make different statements as Jeff explains. All have elements to lend themselves to dramatic impact. It's the decision of the photographer as to where how and when to tell the story. Is the story about where "they" put the house, or rather where "you" decided to put it?