The Grand Vista

Unless you live in the middle of nowhere or you're willing to travel long distances, photographing sweeping landscapes is not an option for photographers in the east. There just aren't any grand open spaces stretching to the horizon east of the Mississippi. The one exception to that might be taking photos from the top of the Appalachian mountains.

Occasionally, I will see something locally that I think might make a nice landscape, but in a much more restricted sense. One thing I love about the east is the abundance of trees, but they do tend to block the horizon in many cases.

One spring, I noticed a local farm where the red out buildings seemed to pop against the greens of the season. A few mornings later, I returned at sunrise to try to capture it. The morning was sunny, but cloudless and blank skies are not very interesting to include, but in a picture like this, you don't really have a choice. I think it would have been extremely odd to have excluded the sky completely.

One "trick" that can be used with landscape photography is to include something in the foreground that will lead your eye into the picture - a big rock or a fallen log or something like that.  All I had was the grass, which was four or five inches tall, so I got right down on the ground to take this shot.  That caused the grass in the forefront, which wouldn't have even been noticeable had I been standing, to become a major element in the frame, taking up almost a third of the composition. The jury is still out on whether this helps lead your eye into the photo or makes it more interesting.

There was an epilogue to this story. A few weeks later, I returned to film the farm from a different angle once the grass had reached waist height.  I parked on the side of the road, got my camera equipment out, and walked down the road a ways to where I intended to film. When I crossed over the guardrail and looked up, the field had been mowed the day before, leaving yellowed stubbly short stalks in place of what had been a lush looking landscape.  As they say, timing is everything.