Shapes

Week 3

Once again I went back and forth on what to do this week. The photograph I finally selected was taken from the air as we flew back from Calgary. The flight path goes from Canada over the upper midwest of the United States and is spectacular in many areas.

I started by taking photographs of circular irrigation patterns but couldn't really make anything work. I ended up with this aerial of mountains and water but if you click on it and look in the top right hand corner you will see an irrigation circle.

What I like about it is the demonstration of chaos theory in the erosion of the mountains and the structure of the river (look up chaos theory if you don't believe me). These are shapes at their most sensuous and are present everywhere in nature. This shot of gardens in Papua New Guinea is another example of shapes from the air, although it is not cropped to accentuate the shapes.

The light comes from the early afternoon sun so the shadows aren't real long yet. I used my Nikon D3 with 70-300 mm VR Nikkor lens at 70mm, f5, ASA 800 in aperture priority to get a fast shutter speed of 1/2000. The airplane was at altitude, so maybe 30,000 feet. At this height you are shooting through a lot of atmosphere especially considering that it is not straight down. The moisture in air means it is blue and there is no contrast. I'm sticking with square and B&W this week for the format. I did everything I could think of to get contrast and used a green filter in the photoshop conversion.

Idea based on Shaping Up, pages 116-117 in the book 50 Photo Projects, by Lee Frost