Aerial View of the Carson Valley #5

Any comments or ratings are appreciated! :-)

My biggest concern with this one: IS IT BORING? :-)

Hey Lou Ann, long time no see....this is interesting but as you suspected (from what your post sez...) it may be a bit mondane.

 

There is visual interst, the pathways below are knitting a patern and the texture of the rock and riparian growths along the seeps are good too. But something is missing...maybe a strong focal point of some sort.

 

I use to be amazed when I would get a box of slides back when I lived at the Grand Canyon and the shots that I thought would be so hot were just a bit plain. There is a need in a landscape shot to make it "punch", like a geological feature that holds ones interest...something that is just too interesting to look away from.

 

I am interested in your shot in that there are all these trails below and somehow would like to know more....and yet somehow the scale is throwing me off. It would be good to try to get a foregroung object in too to give the shot scale. As the shot here could be fron a few hundred feet above on a road cutout or thousands of feet above in an airplane...maybe not that dramatic....but you get the idea.

 

Anyway, hope you have great holidays and happy trails in 2005!! Best Regards, Bradley

Yeah - that's about what I was thinking ... you've put words to it quite well, Thanks, Brad! There is a focal point of interest missing. Yet ... the first few ratings are better than the first few ratings from the other aerial shots that I've uploaded. Go figure! :-)

The main point of interest seems to be the ridge in the middle, so maybe cropping it into a better position would help. My first thought, because the ridge is going right, and the valley is flowing that way, you should crop the left hand side away, but that leaves the cut-off curve of the road, which since its such a strong, man-made feature, I find a little distracting. Maybe using the ridge as a frame by cropping from the right would be better? That improves the road, reducing it to a single curve. It also leaves that nice looking saucer shaped bit of land at the top.

 

And a bit of B&W just for the hell of it.

Wow, Stephen! I love what you did here. It looks fabulous! I wasn't necessarily thinking about the ridge as a focal point ... but now that you point it out, it really is, isn't it? :-) I was having trouble finding "focal points" and taking the time to get the camera pointed and tripping the shutter ... so I ended up pointing my camera out the window and just clicking away. These are some of the shots that I like the best, there were a LOT of throw-aways. This one really stands out to me, but I wasn't sure it was worth anything to anyone else. I really DO like what you did with it!!

Lou Ann, don't tell anybody but I have never seen anything like this. To me it looks like an alien landscape. I'm a big city boy. From where I sit, it looks like you could get lost real easy, maybe starve or get eaten by wolves.

 

With all that said, I'm uping my rating because this photograph made my imagination work...overtime. Happy New Year.

Howard - I have news for you! :-) If you don't want me to tell anyone ... well, you know..... :-D

Ya' know ... I'm a big city girl, myself. That's why I'm so drawn to landscape photography. Because when I'm sitting in bumper to bumper traffic twice a day every day just to get to work, and can go weeks on end without seeing any green thing other than trees planted by the side of the road ... I dream about mountains and woods and streams and think about how nice it would be to spend more time in places like that. (Then I remember that those places are like they are because so few people live there ... and I realize that I live exactly where I should be living!!)

When I was visiting my uncle in NV this summer, I stayed in his guest room. His home is on the side of this mountain. Every morning I would wake up and look out the window onto this view that I've already posted. One morning, just as the darkness was turning to dawn, I watched an animal (!!) walk across the lenai (right in front of my face). When I described the shape and size of the animal to my uncle later that morning, he was absolutely sure that I had seen a PANTHER!!!!!!! And just the two or three mornings before I had been out there at the same time taking photos. I could have been EATEN!!!! Yup - I certainly AM living in the right place. :-)

I love living in the country - I get to see wildlife almost every single day. Some things I DON'T like seeing, like scorpions, but I do love the birds and unusual animals I see here. I don't know if I can go back to living in the city again. I commute twice every day 45 minutes to get to work in the city and home again, but it's worth it. The only bad thing is the potential to flood, being here on the river.

 

As for your shot, I like seeing the lines and forms, but find my eyes head straight to the black mark in the center. I find it a little unsettling because my attention isn't held at the black mark and my eyes don't know where to go next. I still think it's remarkable that you were up in the air, taking these shots!

This looks like an abstract to me of nice shapes and colors. Not that it doesn't have detail, it's just that there's no foreground reference point. I guess that what make it look abstract and for that reason, I like it.

Lou Ann- lots of interesting shapes and green line variations of color going on in this one. Amazing how much detail you were able to get considering your altitude!

I consider myself a small town girl! Just can't tolerate big cities for long. I love to visit them though. The absolute country is just way too quiet for me, I need a little noise! I'm with Howard on this, I fear I might get really lost and sized up for dinner by the wolves! LOL, of course, it really doesn't take much to get me lost! LOL We lived in Columbus, Oh. for 3 years and I never could quite figure out the mass transit system, scared the heck out of me! LOL. The girls I worked with always teased the daylights out of me! On my days off, the kids and I use to take day long excursions, we always ended up lost somehwere in Columbus. With less than 3/4 of a million people in Columbus proper, it would seem not too big on paper, but considering the surrounding suburbs add another 1/4 million, making the 1 million population seem really huge to me, especially when you consider I grew up in a town of less than 10,000. Now I'm back to a city of less than 7,000.

I find it reasonably interesting looking at the detail and following all the lines around. I would go for making it an abstract shot as Stephen's idea.

 

The weakness of it to my mind is it ain't quite one thing or another. It isn't quite abstract enough to make an impact that way nor have the focus Ken mentions to make it more of a landscape.

 

Did you hang out the window for these shots? They are very clear for 'through the window'. And what happened to your car?

I didn't hang out the window ... it was a fixed window (plexiglass) on the plane door. The car was comfortably parked at the airport near the hangar. Really - it was a wonderful ride and not scary at all!!

I mean what has happened to the car in your portrait??

Oh - duh, me!! :-) The CAR in my PORTRAIT is gone because I have been trying to find a chance to get someone to take my picture in MY car ... not my friend's Z3. MY car is much more reflective of my road trips. It's an SUV with tags that say "RDTRP". :-D In the meantime, I figure that the picture of me on a hike in Nevada is a more honest representation of who I truly am!! After my trip in July, there'll have to be a portrait of me standing in front of the new London city hall!! :-D