Places

It’s often struck me that places, just like people, have characters all their own. Trying to describe that character is fertile ground for the photographer. Here again, it often helps to think about what it is that makes a place unique. Is it the energy or a feeling it generates? The light? The architecture? The way it incorporates the natural world?

Many times it is the people that define the character of a place. Photographing people as they work, play, relax, whatever, can be a great starting point to understanding and describing the character of a place.

Sometimes the emptiness of a scene can be a way of understanding ‘place’. I’ve even tried to describe the vastness of an emptiness in a photograph. This too can be a challenge when it involves a grand landscape or scenic, because now we’re confining the scale of something that moves us in a two-dimensional rectangle. While that seems like an obvious point, it bears repeating.

One of the first things I learned that really drove this home was the idea of context. By this I mean, creating a frame of reference that lends scale to the image. When we do this, we’re giving our viewer a reference point, a visual scale that communicates the relative size of the objects we’ve captured in the frame.

For example, in the image to the right, there’s a tiny boat anchored in the bay. The boat isn’t really that small, but the landscape in which it sits is so large, that it dwarfs the boat. This gives the brain something to reference and lends the image scale. If the boat is that small, imagine how tiny the people in it would be! Now you’ve got a sense of the size of this part of the Dalmatian Coast where the Adriatic meets the Velebit Mountains.

Click on any region in the drop down menu under ‘Places’ above, or the link below for galleries of images from various places around the world.

More: Image galleries

Places

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