Castle

NeilL

Another where nature was hogging the foreground. Maybe not altogether awful in this case, but next time I'll take the chainsaw and half that forest will go!:huh Do they teach tree climbing in photography school?

Neil

InsuredDisaster

Hey, I looked at your image a while back, and then I looked at it recently. I'm just not really sure it works for me. I'm not really getting a sense of scale from this. It could be huge, but it doesn't feel huge. I'm not sure a top down angle works for it. It all blends in together and seems very flat. Do you have any other angles?

NeilL

InsuredDisaster wrote: »

Hey, I looked at your image a while back, and then I looked at it recently. I'm just not really sure it works for me. I'm not really getting a sense of scale from this. It could be huge, but it doesn't feel huge. I'm not sure a top down angle works for it. It all blends in together and seems very flat. Do you have any other angles?

Thanks for the helpful crit, ID.

A lot of the Australian bush in mountainous areas is like this, a messy tangle of trees and underbrush and rocks that is practically impassable. Any one item, such as the rocks here, is quite unremarkable, compared with geographical entities in many other places in the world. Australia is not very impressive photographically when it comes to the impact of scale, unless it's the scale of endless empty space itself. So first, I could not easily reach these rocks, which are about 700 metres away on the side of an escarpment about 500-600 metres high. Man-size at these rocks is about 0.7cm. They are in fact above my line of sight, but through the 300mm, with the great area of foreground, they look below me. Then, even if I were to get closer to them, which would also be more recognisably below them, what you would see would be some boring average rocks sticking up into the sky.

However, the natural Australian landscape is often quite unique in the sheer volume of its wild tangle, and in the small, even minute, detail with which it confronts you, in a kind of bewildering dappled extravagance. If you are looking for the geographically infantile huge-scale classic lines of the north Americas it will be in vain. Australia is extremely old and worn down and introspective, like all aged things. But it is not a civilised aging, like in Europe, rather the uncouth aging of something totally feral. It doesn't leap upon the earth and into the sky like kid goats, like the peaks of the Rockies or the Yukon. In Australia you have to abandon such expectations. Our highest mountain is a very domestic 2228m. Only where there are large expanses of water, which is a kind of universal visual language, such as along the coast, and I think we have more and more interesting coast than any other country, does Australia get into the same ballpark as the north Americas, etc.

The kind of photograph that you can take in Australia is limited and expanded along the lines I have been describing. In this photo, which is no more than an exploratory snap for future reference, I think you can see what I mean by that wild impenetrable tangle, the plethora of fine detail and the quality of great age. There is also an orgiastic promiscuity there, if you have that kind of imagination!

Neil