Here’s another orphan image I’ve had sitting on the hard drive for awhile. I wasn’t sure what to do with it for quite some time but I thought this would be a good time to post it and continue the geometric theme of my recent posts. This image comes from West Fork Trail, just north of Sedona in the Coconino National Forest. It was a peculiar find and I knew immediately that I wanted to do something with it. If you follow my Instagram feed (@johnnyhifi) you might have already seen the iPhone version of it back in December of 2012.
I first tried shooting from the other side but the landscape from that point of view was not attractive. As I came around the other side it looked much nicer. In retrospect I wish I would have taken a step back and included more of the brick wall but at the time I was focusing my attention on the background and how it was interacting with the circular frame. I was trying to shoot fairly straight on so that my circle didn’t become an oval but at the same time I wanted to try and keep the peak of that rock somewhat centered. I was also trying to keep the bricks somewhat level. The brick wall (or, rather, the circular window in it) was at an odd height so I was in a half-standing, half-squatting position that was quite awkward to maintain for a great length of time as I played with my composition.
Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows that I don’t like to rely too heavily on software to make my images but I ended up doing some serious Photoshopping on this one in order to make it an image that I wanted to share. Overall the landscape was appealing but there were also some dead sticks and half a dead tree stump sticking up in the foreground which I found quite distracting. I ended up working with the cloning tool to remove the more unsightly parts of the landscape and increase the aesthetic quality of the image. This is one case where I was limited to what I could include/exclude in the composition just by moving my camera because moving too much left, right, up or down means that I would lose the geometric characteristic of the “porthole.” Since I couldn’t move the wall I had to take what I could get and then utilize the modern technology at my disposal to make things match my vision in post-production.
5D Mk III with 24-105mm f/4.0L IS USM lens. ISO 100, f/13, 1/80 sec.
© 2013 Johnny Kerr Photography